TradeLens, Maersk and IBM’s major blockchain initiative, has taken another major step towards its goal of revolutionizing the global supply chain after the US Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) amended its regulations relating to cooperation between carriers.
Container shipping lines had previously been prohibited from working together on certain matters without the scrutiny of the FMC.
However, under ‘The TradeLens Agreement’, which was published on 23 December 2019 and will come into effect on 5 February 2020, those laws will be relaxed.
The document reads: “The purpose of this Agreement is to authorize the parties to cooperate with respect to the provision of data to a blockchain-enabled, global trade digitized solution that will enable shippers, authorities and other stakeholders to exchange information on supply chain events and documents”.
Furthermore, it goes on to say TradeLens will provide “application programming interfaces for the publication of and subscription to event data describing the physical progress of cargo through the supply chain and associated milestones.”
TradeLens was launched in August 2018, a story Port Technology International reported on, and has since grown to include more than 100 participants and processed over ten million shipping events.
Since May 2019 it has accounted for more than half the global cargo traffic when MSC and CMA CGM, the second and fourth biggest container shipping lines in the world respectively, joined it.
To read ‘The TradeLens Agreement’ from the FMC in full, click here.
