Win for Blockchain Industry as Cargill and Agrocorp Settle US$12M Commodity Trade Via Blockchain

The cross-continent deal traded wheat from North America to Southeast Asia

In a win for the blockchain industry, Singapore-based blockchain platform dltledgers announced today that a cross-continent trade transaction has been facilitated via its platform.

The deal, a US$12 million commodity trade of wheat from North America to Indonesia, took place between global agribusiness corporation Cargill and Singapore-headquartered integrated agricultural and food solutions provider Agrocorp.

International cooperative bank Rabobank joined ship owner Amarante and shipping agent Transmarine as partners to the deal.

“Working with Cargill, Agrocorp and Rabobank to facilitate this deal on our platform has proven our blockchain solution’s ability to go mainstream,” said Samir Neji, CEO, dltledgers, in the statement. He also said that dltledgers has been seeing increasing adoption of its blockchain technology.

Agrocorp has been involved in blockchain-based trade execution for well over a year, Abhinav Vijay, Sustainability Manager, Agrocorp International noted in the statement.

“Considering the current world climate and the logistical challenges to move physical documents around the globe, this is just a start and we hope to execute more trades via the platform in the near future,” Vijay added.

The dltledgers blockchain solution is built on the open-source Hyperledger Fabric platform and has facilitated live trade finance transactions worth SG$3 billion, with over 400 global traders, 45 banking partners, and ecosystem partners in the thousands.

Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Hyperledger Consortium, pointed out that a single blockchain transaction can “include multiple unconnected counterparties, represent tens of millions of dollars, and involve the registration of hundreds of different data points into the platform.”

Blockchain allows for real-time monitoring and regulation, digitizes the exchange of information, and hits the fast-forward button on settlement timelines.

The Cargill-Agrocorp trade deal is an example of this. It reached settlement on April 1, within just five days as compared to the time-consuming traditional settlement process, and the dltledgers platform created a shared, unchangeable record of the transaction.

Rabobank’s key facilitators, Mario Cortinhal in North America and Olivier De Jong in Singapore said in the statement, “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 US$10 trillion trade-finance industry.”

The decentralized technology has been hailed as a potential disruptor in the commodities trading segment due to the solutions it provides to the time-laden paperwork-heavy and complex traditional trade settlement process.

Industries have been slow to catch up with blockchain, however. It can potentially put middle men out of business, and destabilize traditional price-setting machinery. Additionally, company systems need time to adapt their infrastructure to the technology, which doesn’t come cheap.

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