Blockchain Hamburg
Blockchain in Hamburg includes research and practical tests of shared digital records in logistics and finance. A blockchain lets participants check the history of a record without each maintaining an unrelated version. Hamburg's freight companies tested the technology for shipping documents and container release through projects including Hansebloc and Robob.
Trade finance connects these experiments to banking because the lender needs to know who controls the documents for a shipment. A reliable electronic record can help carriers and banks coordinate the transfer of goods and document rights. Technical cooperation also depends on the legal recognition of the electronic documents.
Why a freight document is the hard problem
A bill of lading can give its holder the right to claim a shipment. An electronic equivalent needs a reliable way to identify who controls the record and to preserve its integrity. A distributed ledger is one way to do that; a centralized registry can also meet the requirement. The UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records is technology-neutral.
A financing bank needs control of the document it accepts as security. The carrier and the other parties must accept the electronic record under the applicable law. Hamburg's projects brought logistics companies and researchers together to test those practical conditions.
The financing requirements connect these projects to trade finance in Germany. Related applications form part of blockchain in Germany.
Hansebloc: freight documents across land, sea and air
Hansebloc, from Hanseatische Blockchain-Innovationen für Logistik und Supply Chain Management, set out to make the electronic exchange of freight documents secure across all three transport modes. Hansebloc started in April 2018 with a total volume of around 3.1 million euros, of which the Federal Ministry of Education and Research funded roughly 1.9 million, and it ran to September 2020.
The consortium comprised ten northern German partners from the Logistik-Initiative Hamburg network, with four logistics companies, Emons, Kroop, Sovereign Speed and Shot Logistics, four IT service providers, and two university partners in HAW Hamburg and the Kühne Logistics University. The Digital Hub Logistics in the Speicherstadt oversaw the Hansebloc project and its participating organizations.
The forwarders had to agree that the same record governs the handover between them, which required agreement on liability as well as the technical standard.
Robob: releasing a container without the paper
Robob examined how to release imported sea freight using electronic records. Robob mapped that release onto a ledger with smart contracts, started in August 2018 with a volume of around 1.3 million euros, and was coordinated by Dakosy Datenkommunikationssystem AG together with the Technical University of Hamburg.
Dakosy operates the port's data communication system and used Robob to test changes to that process. A logistics standard depends on the participation of the organizations that hold the relevant data.
Hapag-Lloyd took the other route available at the time and joined Tradelens, the platform IBM and Maersk built for supply chain partners to exchange information digitally, in July 2019. Tradelens has since been discontinued, because a platform run by one carrier and one technology firm asked competitors to put their shipment data into a competitor's system. The consortium structure Hamburg's publicly funded projects used was addressing exactly that problem.
The Blockchain Research Lab
The Blockchain Research Lab is a Hamburg nonprofit research institution, organized as Blockchain Research Lab gGmbH. The Blockchain Research Lab studies blockchain applications and their economic and social effects, and publishes scientific papers and conference contributions.
What a bank in Hamburg does with this
Trade finance is where a port city's blockchain work turns into a banking subject. A letter of credit is a bank's promise to pay against documents, and checking those documents is manual work with a well-known discrepancy rate: a first presentation is frequently rejected for an inconsistency between papers, which delays payment and ties up working capital on both sides.
A ledger-based document set addresses that by making the documents one record instead of several copies that can disagree. The German research on the financing side has run partly through cooperation between Commerzbank and the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics on future supply chains, which approaches it from the goods and not from the payment. Finance Loop covers the instrument side at trade finance in Germany and the corporate angle at corporate treasury.
Insurance, and the second Hamburg industry
Hamburg is a marine insurance center as well as a port, with both activities involving shipping. Marine cargo insurance prices a risk against a voyage and a cargo whose details come from the same documents the financing uses, so an insurer gains from the same record for the same reason: fewer sources of truth about what is on the ship.
The parametric case is the one insurers in Hamburg have looked at: a policy that pays automatically when an agreed data source reports an agreed event, with no claim to file. For a delayed vessel or a temperature excursion in a reefer container, the data already exists in the carrier's systems. What a parametric policy needs is an agreed source that both parties trust, which is the problem of selecting an oracle to supply insurance data. Finance Loop covers the sector at insurtech in Germany.
Hamburg's exchange and the digital asset side
The city has a long exchange tradition, and the trading and digital asset infrastructure that matters in Germany sits in Frankfurt and Stuttgart. Finance Loop covers those at digital assets in Germany and blockchain in Stuttgart.
Supervision for a Hamburg firm runs through BaFin in Bonn and Frankfurt like anywhere else in Germany, so there is no local regime to learn. Hamburg offers digital asset businesses proximity to the logistics industry, where the technology is applied to documents and cargo.
Why is blockchain used in Hamburg's logistics?
Freight documents need a record of who controls them and when that control changes. Hamburg's Hansebloc and Robob projects tested shared electronic records for freight documents and the release of sea freight imports. Blockchain is one technical approach; acceptance by the parties and applicable law are also necessary.
What was Hansebloc?
Hansebloc was a research project on the secure electronic exchange of freight documents, run from April 2018 to September 2020 by ten northern German partners from the Logistik-Initiative Hamburg network, with a total volume of around 3.1 million euros and roughly 1.9 million from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The consortium included four logistics companies, four IT service providers and two universities, HAW Hamburg and the Kühne Logistics University, and the Digital Hub Logistics in the Speicherstadt oversaw it.
Where can I find blockchain contacts in Hamburg?
The city's logistics projects and the Blockchain Research Lab are starting points for research and supply-chain questions. The Hanseatic Blockchain Institute, a Hamburg association founded in 2019, holds its Blockchain Monday talks twice a month, online and in the city. Finance Loop lists financial technology events and other contacts under fintech in Hamburg.
What does the Blockchain Research Lab do?
The Blockchain Research Lab is a Hamburg nonprofit research institution studying blockchain applications and their economic and social effects. The Blockchain Research Lab publishes scientific papers and conference contributions.
Blockchain in Hamburg and Finance Loop
Finance Loop connects the Hamburg subject with the people who finance it: the trade finance desks, the corporate treasurers and the banks that would have to accept an electronic document of title. Finance Loop is the meeting place for the Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty track, where supply chain and document questions come up alongside the payment ones. Finance Loop members reach the logistics side and the banking side of the same problem in one place.
Finance Loop is a professional network supporting the institutional use of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.