Using Blockchain technologies to facilitate international trading

Abstract

International trading is the lifeblood of the modern economy, and, despite its importance, it is still governed by outdated processes and ecosystems generating huge amounts of challenges and causing USD billions of losses per year to the global economy. We have demonstrated through our research some of the most important challenges that international trading is suffering from. We also demonstrated that the global trading ecosystem is yet to benefit from the digital revolution, and due to the sensitive nature and the complexity of the international trading value chain requiring trust, security and consensus, Blockchain seems to be the perfect solution for these challenges. We investigated the features of Blockchain and how they can be utilized to answer the identified challenges and we found out that this technology is, as we anticipated, a potential adequate solution for global trading. Nevertheless, our research revealed that, due to the disruptive nature of Blockchain, such a move can face huge deployment barriers and resistance to change, and needs first to have a global agreement on how the underlying technologies, processes and governance will be run, then be proven in a next step through a proof-of-concept and finally introduced through a well-designed stepwise approach.