Today Singapore startup dltledgers disclosed a $12 million trade finance transaction involving a cross-continent shipment for agribusiness firms Cargill and Agrocorp, involving Rabobank and others. This wasn’t a blockchain pilot since the dltledgers supply chain platform has been in production for 18 months and has processed more than $3.3 billion of deals. To date, much of dltledgers’ trade has been focused on Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Australasia. This transaction was for a wheat shipment from North America to Indonesia.
The enterprise blockchain solution enables all participants to have a shared view of the progress of the shipment as it travels across the globe. Given the current disruptions around the world, that transparency is essential. But the biggest win is the commodities trade took five days to settle on April 1st, compared to up to a month.
“Consensus-driven smart contracts in this deal minimized our time spent on processing documents by more than half. Riding on the success of this test-case, Rabobank is excited to advance the USD 10 trillion trade-finance industry,” said Rabobank’s Mario Cortinhal in North America and Olivier De Jong in Singapore.
Singapore-based Agrocorp was the first big commodities firm to sign up to the dltledgers platform at launch, and as of nine months ago, had processed more than $100 million in transactions.
The interesting aspect of this particular trade, is the other participants are involved in several blockchain consortia.
For example, Cargill was involved in a pilot transaction on the Contour platform (formerly Voltron) for letters of credit. And it is now a founding member of Covantis, the agribusiness initiative that also boasts as members ADM, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus, COFCO and Glencore Agriculture.
“We see this transaction as the latest example of how working together and using technology to solve challenges can improve trade, as well as traceability, food safety, nutrition and more,” said Jennifer Davidson, Senior Trade Capital Markets Coordinator at Cargill.
But the other link between Cargill and dltledgers is they are both members of enterprise blockchain consortium Hyperledger. While dltledgers uses Hyperledger Fabric, Cargill is working with Intel, Target and others on Hyperledger Grid, a set of tools for supply chain blockchains, which is based on Hyperledger Sawtooth, an alternative to Fabric.
Turning to Dutch bank Rabobank, it is a member of the commodity trade finance platform komgo, which has also passed the $1 billion transaction mark and is initially focused on energy. Plus, it is part of the we.trade trade finance platform. Outside of this, late last year, it experimented with a repo (sale and repurchase) financing transaction with Concord Resources and warehousing firm PGS.
