Supply Chain & Trade Finance SIG - 1H 2024 Report
Overall Health
The Supply Chain & Trade Finance SIG is very healthy. We continue to build a community of outside parties who contribute to our webinars. In addition, a closer collaboration with the Hyperledger carbon accounting and action SIG (CA2SIG) has begun. We held seven webinars in the first half of 2024 and are in the process of scheduling webinars for the second half. Our ebook focused on Supply Chain and Trade Finance applications, that use Hyperledger projects, has been translated into Japanese. We look forward to additional ebook language translations into Portuguese and Chinese this year.
Issues and Challenges
- A small portion of our members have strong technical skills although not specific to the Hyperledger suite of projects
- There exists a need for additional technical skills focused on Hyperledger tools including solution architecture and coding to provide for new projects that include prototyping.
- Thus far, we are finding it difficult to extract time from the Hyperledger technical community due to their busy schedules. The time requested is to answer high-level questions associated with Hyperledger project architecture.
- Our general meetings most often do not have attendance from other Hyperledger SIGs. We are addressing this by including other SIGs in our general meeting reminders.
Overall Activity in the last 6 months
- Tom Klein, Alicia Noel, and Jeff Pribich are current co-chairs.
- The SIG has decided to start a blog, to share useful information related to Hyperledger and blockchain use in supply chain and trade finance.
- The SIG has published its first blog. The blog discusses the following:
- Business level insights and the dominance of Hyperledger Fabric.
- Solution Architecture Level Insights
- Highlighted Solutions
- Future Opportunities with Hyperledger
- In addition to the co-chair members, the SIG has additional contributors to our blogs covering NFTs and Trade Finance. Scheduled for 2H are:
- Ned Thomson describes how different SC &TF business-focused consortiums are using blockchain technologies.
- Toby Tobias on NFTs.
- Seven webinars in Q1 and Q2 have had up to twenty four live attendees and from 82 to more than 200 viewers on YouTube.
- Leanne Kemp of Everledger: Enhancing Traceability in the Diamond Industry: Integrating Financial Accountability.
- Jeff Pribich of Hyperledger: Demonstrated on how a Supply Chain digital twin, utilizing IoT and AI, would perform for coffee exported from Ethiopian farms to U.S. wholesalers. Used a simulated desktop blockchain.
- Ashish Anand of Brú Finance onTokenized Commodity Finance: Bru Finance is focused on the commodity sector vertical through a buildout of a complete full-stack commodity chain. Bru launched the 1st tokenized commodity exchange in India.
- Meral Sengoz(Partner) of T3i Partner Network: “Digitization of Trade and Trade Finance in Türkiye: Blockchain for Export Transactions and the Economic impact of the UN Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records”.
- Bobbi Muscara, Founder of The Giving Chain and Director of Education at Ledger Academy: How the Giving Chain is using Proof Of Donation NFTs to show Proof of Impact and leveraging the revolutionary accounting tools available for NGOs on Circularity Finance programmable donation platform CiFi Give.
- Alexander Style, Director of Business Development at Vinturas: Shared how Vinturas is using Hyperledger Fabric in their interoperable network solution for end-to-end supply chain documentation in the finished vehicle industry.
- Saptarshi Choudhury, VP Product, and Pavan Adhav: Farm To Plate team at Paramount Software Solutions, Inc will speak with Suvo Sarkar, founder of Fishmongers, about how Fishmongers is using the Farm to Plate platform tracking live fish, to reduce waste and improve producer incomes in the aquaculture industry.
- There have been 24 editions of the SIG Weekly News Digest in the first half of the year, hosted on the SIG wiki. The digests have highlighted hundreds of news articles related to supply chains, trade finance, sustainability, and related issues. Andrea Frosini is the main driver of this initiative and shares it weekly over the SIG listserv and our LinkedIn profile.
- The Hyperledger Supply Chain and Trade Finance LinkedIn page is used to share SIG events and our weekly news digest.
Planned Work Products
- Five additional blog entries are planned for 2024. Topics are Traceability, SC &TF business-focused consortiums and what they are doing with blockchain technology, use of NFTs in SC&TF solutions, application of MLETR using Hyperledger, and how IoT brings blockchains to life.
- Hosting future webinars.
- Closer collaboration with the climate action and accounting SIG (CA2SIG).
- Appraise the effort to produce a solution architecture for a Net-Zero Digital Twin Supply Chain template using Hyperledger technologies. This work requires contributions from multiple Hyperledger SIGs and technical assistance from Hyperledger technical staff.
- Refreshing the Supply Chain & Trade Finance SIG wiki page to make it more engaging.
- Pursuing opportunities to collaborate with additional SIGs.
Participant Diversity
- Still needs work across all dimensions. The biggest gaps currently observed are:
- Women/POC: Ongoing.
- Technical skills: Most active members have limited technical skills.
- Geographical: Most currently active members are in the US, Canada, and Italy. We've also had members participate from India, China, Rwanda, England, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, and other countries.
- Enterprise representation: Active representation from enterprise staff would enable us to pursue most relevant projects.
Additional Information
- The SC&TF weekly newsletter is open for others wishing to add their unique content prior to its release. Alicia Noel has developed a public template to assist in adding content.