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posted by hubie on Monday December 05 2022, @02:10PM   Printer-friendly

A.P. Moller - Maersk (Maersk) and IBM today announced the decision to withdraw the TradeLens offerings and discontinue the platform:

Computing giant IBM Corp. and Danish shipping company A.P. Moller – Maersk are discontinuing their blockchain-enabled shipping platform, TradeLens, which was jointly developed by the two companies for tracking shipments and managing supply chains in the container industry.

[...] "TradeLens was founded on the bold vision to make a leap in global supply chain digitization as an open and neutral industry platform," said Rotem Hershko, head of business platforms at Maersk. "Unfortunately, while we successfully developed a viable platform, the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved."

TradeLens was launched in 2018 as a collaborative project between the two companies using IBM's Hyperledger Fabric blockchain technology. It's used to connect shippers, shipping lines, freight forwarders, port and terminal operators, transportation and customs authorities in order to reduce costs by tracking shipping data and documents.

[...] Speaking to SiliconANGLE today, Neeraj Srivastava, co-founder and chief technical officer of DLT Labs, a blockchain firm that develops solutions for fintech and supply chains, argued that TradeLens failed because it spent too much time on hyping itself and too little time on innovation.

Maersk press release. Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @02:21PM (1 child)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday December 05 2022, @02:21PM (#1281255)

    > the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved

    Yeah, you can get some of the people to cooperate all of the time.

    You can get all of the people to cooperate some of the time.

    But, to get all of the people to cooperate all of the time, you need a really big stick. Apparently IBM+Maersk didn't have enough stick, or carrot, to make it work.

    --
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    • (Score: 2) by legont on Monday December 05 2022, @07:25PM

      by legont (4179) on Monday December 05 2022, @07:25PM (#1281307)

      Exactly.
      Folks don't want global accountability in such an interesting business as moving containers. Too many applications require exceptions.

      --
      "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
  • (Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday December 05 2022, @02:57PM (1 child)

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 05 2022, @02:57PM (#1281259) Journal

    Did this run on a separate blockchain or did it build on Ethereum?

    Ether is, I think, the answer to the question "What else can it do except be used for currency speculation?". The prescience to allow other apps to build on top of it and the willingness to move to proof of stake (energy efficient) mining probably make this a winner.

    (Full disclosure, now that I've thought through it and said it out loud, I'm moving my wet and dry wallets to Ether.)

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @03:51PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday December 05 2022, @03:51PM (#1281273)

      Ether is, I think, the answer to the question "How do I create a blockchain system that can be used for something other than currency speculation, and still put a fat siphon on the value stream back into my own pockets?"

      The prescience obvious development to allow other apps to build on top of it and the willingness to move to proof of stake (energy efficient) mining probably make this a winner model for future development by others who don't want to pay tax to the developers of Ether.

      Shameless plug [assignonward.com] for proof of stake cryptocurrency without the speculator's tax.

      What IBM+Maersk were doing could also be proof of stake based, all it really was was an agreed upon record (ledger) whereon the participants share information with each other. Blockchain is a tool, the innovation was transparency, and apparently they took the transparency too far for the players to be comfortable participating long term.

      Transparency is a Very Good ThingTM from the global (meaning: all participants') perspective. Unfortunately, in a zero-sum-game, which many business arrangements are (or, more importantly, are perceived to be by executive management), helping everyone else is sometimes perceived as not helping one's self as much as might otherwise be possible...

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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by stormreaver on Monday December 05 2022, @03:16PM

    by stormreaver (5101) on Monday December 05 2022, @03:16PM (#1281261)

    So IBM and Maersk failed to dazzle the industry with false brilliance, and the industry saw through the attempts to baffle them with bullshit. I applaud their exercise of common sense.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by istartedi on Monday December 05 2022, @07:01PM (2 children)

    by istartedi (123) on Monday December 05 2022, @07:01PM (#1281300) Journal

    Of course, because unless you were smoking the Crypto Bubble hopium, you realized that while cryptography is required for secure transactions, the blockchain isn't. Simply maintaining security (login credentials, etc.) is all you really need. Layering blockchain over a clearing house is just a massively energy intensive complex extra step. No need. The Federal Reserve has been quietly clearing checks for decades, without a blockchain. It's all digital now which is how you can deposit checks with your phone, but it's not "blockchain", it almost certainly never will be, and it's about as secure as you can reasonably get.

    I'm not saying there's no application for blockchains, just that this isn't one of them.

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    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @07:43PM (1 child)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday December 05 2022, @07:43PM (#1281310)

      All the supply-chain-management-blockchain hype was around sharing of information, basically transparency, and the blockchain is useful for that. Security was a layer on top but that's just ensuring that the people recording stuff on the blockchain are who they say they are (and have permission to play in the sandbox...)

      I feel that the dis-incentive for doing this on blockchain comes from the same place as our corporate mandate to delete all e-mails over 2 years old... discoverability of deep history is not always an asset, and in many situations the liabilities of long term recordkeeping outweigh the assets.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
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