The Italian Post Office, or Poste Italiane is on a list of recent additions to the Hyperledger Community. Others that have jumped on board are Myndshft, Omnigate, BTS Digital LLP, Exactpro Systems Limited, Jitsuin, Lares Blockchain, among others. Poste Italiane thinks that blockchain is a technology with a lot of potential, and they don’t want to miss out.
Read: What is Hyperledger?
The Chief Information Officer for Poste Italiane, Mirko Mischiatti, said that,
“Poste Italiane wants to actively participate in this new and exciting community by becoming a member of Hyperledger in order to continue its path for the innovation and modernization of financial, logistic and insurance industries. We really look forward to working with other members and making our effort to contribute for the enhancement of blockchain technology.”
There is no doubt that Hyperledger is one of the most successful blockchains when measured by adoption by established industries. IBM has been very successful in selling a Hyperledger variant to its clients, and it has also been used to launch other platforms in the global logistics industry.
The Italian Post Office Joins Swiss Post in Embracing Blockchain
Late last year, Swiss Post, announced that it decided to work with Swisscom on developing a private blockchain that uses Hyperledger.
Swiss Post commented that, “In contrast to “public blockchains” (that use proof-of-work), this private blockchain infrastructure requires much less energy, since it can only be used by identified users who have a contractual relationship with the providers of an application. This enables more efficient agreement procedures as well as significantly higher security and performance.”
The Swiss Post office said that is was planning to use blockchain to produce a platform that would connect public agencies. It chose Hyperledger based on its ability to provide a, “simple, secure, and sustainable” platform. The team plans to make a platform that will achieve the level of security that would be needed for banks but doesn’t plan to share the information in their blockchain outside of Switzerland.
Hyperledger Can Do A Lot
Brian Behlendorf, the Executive Director at Hyperledger commented that, “We wrapped up 2018 with a successful and exciting Hyperledger Global Forum…This first worldwide meeting of the Hyperledger community underscored the growing pace of development and deployment of blockchain in general and our tools and technologies in particular. We are seeing more signs of this accelerating pace of maturation and adoption here in early 2019,” after it was announced that 12 new organizations joined the Hyperledger community.
Hyperledger also announced a new platform, called ‘Hyperledger Grid’, which is made specifically for shipping, tracking, and logistics. Hyperledger Grid is still in its early phases, but it could help companies that want better tracking solutions for their supply chain.
Hyperledger has been employed in the new IBM Food Trust, which is scheduled to be used by Walmart for food tracking this year. There are numerous areas where blockchain could help to ensure the safety of items that are sensitive to temperature, or could be subject to contamination.
Safe in Transit
When it comes to finding out the conditions a shipment of perishable goods has been exposed to, there can be some difficulty. Shipping companies may have access to the data that is collected from monitoring devices installed in refrigerated shipping containers, but the companies that buy the goods rarely do.
Blockchain-based records could change all that if they are combined with real-time monitoring systems that have access to the global telecom networks.
With that, anyone in the supply chain could gain access to a shipping record for goods they are buying. The technology is still a few years away, but there have been tests which confirm that end-to-end monitoring for shipping looks both possible and economically feasible with a blockchain platform.
One question that emerges in all this development is: Where does the common ground exist between platforms?
Given the highly integrated nature of the global economy, it would make sense for all these shipping companies to make sure that cross-platform data integration isn’t difficult to achieve.
