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March 28, 2023 Bitcoin.com

Blockchain-based supply chain platform canned by IBM and Maersk

November 30, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Adoption

Although the TradeLens platform will officially go offline in Q1 2023, Maersk said it's not given up its effort to digitize the supply chain industry.

United States technology company IBM and Danish logistics firm Maersk have decided to discontinue their co-developed blockchain-backed supply chain platform, TradeLens, citing a lack of “global industry collaboration” as a key reason behind the decision.

Maersk stated on Nov. 29 that it has begun taking immediate action to cease operations on the platform which should take full effect by Q1 2023:

“The TradeLens team is taking action to withdraw the offerings and discontinue the platform [...] During this process all parties involved will ensure that customers are attended to without disruptions to their businesses.”

While the blockchain-based shipping solution was introduced by the two firms in August 2018 to help industry participants adopt more efficient international supply chain practices, Maersk stated the platform didn’t reach a level of “commercial viability” to sustain operations:

“While we successfully developed a viable platform, the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved," said Maersk's head of business platforms, Rotem Hershko. "As a result, TradeLens has not reached the level of commercial viability necessary to continue work and meet the financial expectations as an independent business.”

Maersk said the firm would continue its efforts to digitize the supply chain and increase industry innovation through alternative solutions to achieve the desired ends that were envisioned through TradeLens.

TradeLens functioned by tracking and processing critical supply chain data of each shipment in real-time, before stamping a distributed and immutable record of events on-chain for all involved participants to access and validate.

Despite TradeLens not reaching the heights that IBM and Marersk first envisioned, the two companies managed to onboard over 150 companies onto the supply chain-focused blockchain which included a host of port operators, shipping companies and logistics providers.

Among those companies were two of the world’s largest container carriers, CMA CGM and Mediterranean Shipping Company, which integrated the system in October 2020.

The discontinuation of TradeLens comes as data from IBM claims the platform saved users an estimated 20% in documentation costs and reduced the time it takes to ship goods by 40%.

According to Statista, blockchain technology makes keeping data records easier, more transparent, and more secure mostly due to its immutable nature.

Despite this, several shortcomings continue to stall blockchain adoption in the supply chain world, including high transaction costs, privacy concerns, scalability issues and lack of industry collaboration, as evidenced by the lagging adoption of TradeLens.

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Zero-knowledge KYC could solve the privacy vs compliance conundrum: VC partner

October 11, 2022 Coin Telegraph

AML

Zero-knowledge Know Your Customer (KYC) would allow businesses to adhere to strict AML/CTF rules while ensuring customer privacy.

As the Web3 industry matures, Zero-knowledge Know Your Customer (zkKYC) is becoming more widely discussed as a means to comply with strict financial regulations while maintaining user privacy, according to the partner of a venture capital firm.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, John Henderson, partner at Australian-based venture capital firm Airtree Ventures said the successful implementation of a zkKYC system would be “great news for both regulators and consumers” and could increase cryptocurrency adoption:

“Institutions and retail users are more likely to participate in DeFi if they can be confident that they are complying with their AML/CTF obligations.”

Henderson explained a zkKYC system would allow users to prove certain things about themselves to service providers without having to divulge personally identifying data such as their names or identification documents.

In theory, the sharing of that information would be enough to satisfy Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter-terrorist Financing (CTF) regulatory requirements placed on the crypto industry.

“[The system] involves a trusted third party validating my personal information and then issuing a cryptographic proof to my personal wallet, which I could then choose to share, or share attributes of, with financial service providers.”

The benefit of such an approach is that no personally identifying information could be leaked in the event of a security breach of a service provider such as a crypto exchange, Henderson claims, with the identification documents only recoverable when required by authorities.

Many in the crypto community have been critical of the way their personally identifiable information has been handled by some crypto platforms.

Recently, the community shared their concerns after court documents published on Oct. 5 publicly disclosed the personal information and transaction history of thousands of Celsius customers, with some warning they could be used to “dox” users.

Calls to improve privacy for individuals were also loudly sounded at the September Converge22 conference in San Francisco.

Jeremy Allaire, CEO of stablecoin issuer Circle, expressed the need for “advancements” in technologies that prove identities and credentials while simultaneously ensuring individuals’ privacy.

Henderson however admitted that “storage of sensitive information is still an unsolved problem,” sharing two ideas on how the management of such information could take place.

“One idea would be to have trusted entities hold identity documents off-chain and port proof of identity on-chain, without the original documents. Another idea is to sign a wallet transaction with a regulatory institution, who would then register that account with an identity.”

Despite the challenge, Henderson was adamant a zkKYC protocol will form the “building blocks of on-chain reputation scores” allowing “more useful” financial products and services.

“My priority is onboarding the next hundred million users to crypto,” he said, “If we want to achieve internet scale, we need a solution for AML/CTF compliance.”

Airtree Ventures led a $4.7 million seed round into ReputationDAO on Apr. 13, a decentralized autonomous organization which aims to provide a financial reputation and identity service for decentralized finance (DeFi).