Dear Community,

After over a year of round-the-clock development, we officially launched our state of the art platform in January 2019, and now, we’re ready to take on the industry. We are so excited to have you along for the ride and wanted to give you an update on what we’ve been working on since the launch and what we have planned for the rest of the year.

What We’ve Been Up To

Our biggest push since the launch has been, you guessed it, selling access to our amazing Track and Trace Platform. So far, we have been overwhelmed with the amount of interest in what we’ve built, and we are so ready to watch it transform the world of shipping and logistics as we know it.

“ShipChain’s ideal customer is anyone managing a complex supply chain in essentially any industry that strives to stay ahead of the competition. We have seen a keen interest from the food, pharmaceutical, medical, gas, and logistics industries thus far. Our goal is for our clients to have one unified platform for Track and Trace visibility, with our document/data management for immutability and provenance, and Business Intelligence dashboards to quickly identify bottlenecks and/or KPI performance. With ShipChain, your supply chain is more transparent, durable, and secure, saving you time, money, and resources.” – Sam Rusani, CRO

If you are interested in requesting a demo for your business, please complete the form on our newly redesigned website. Each submission gets a customized demo and dedicated customer support. We hope that you will be as in love with our platform as we are, and look forward to seeing you implement our blockchain solution in your supply chain.

Have a tip or lead? Email us at bizdev@shipchain.io .

PLUG AND PLAY

We are so excited to announce that ShipChain was selected to participate in Plug and Play’s 2019 Food and Beverage Accelerator Program in Silicon Valley! The program officially began on Monday, March 11th and will span 12 weeks.

Being chosen for Plug and Play’s Food and Beverage Program is extremely competitive. Hundreds of startups pitched to their team for the opportunity and only 20 were selected to participate.

The Plug and Play network is enormous, with over 280 official corporate partners including Red Bull, Pepsico, Tyson, and Taylor Farms, just to name a few. Joining the Plug and Play family means that we will be able to meet with these partners directly and showcase our fantastic platform to them. “Through private dealflow sessions, exclusive networking events, mentor sessions, and more, these startups will have ample opportunities to land pilots, POCs, new customers, and investment.” – Plug and Play Official Press Release

“Plug and Play will not only introduce ShipChain to additional sources of capital, but it will help companies understand how they can save money, reduce delivery times, and, ultimately, increase business by integrating ShipChain’s track and trace platform into their global logistics network. This is a win-win and we cannot wait to get started.” – John Monarch, CEO

SCANLOG

We recently announced a partnership with Scanlog, a Scandinavian logistics company based out of Sweden. Phase 1 of the partnership will consist of Scanlog installing AXLE gateway devices into their trucks. ShipChain’s location sensors will continuously send out real-time encrypted GPS data to Scanlog’s on-site office, generating unique data signatures that will be stored on the Ethereum blockchain.

This partnership allows us to enter into the European market. We have said time and time again that ShipChain is a company with global ambitions, and we are excited to see our vision come to life.

BLOCKIES

We are also excited to roll out our dynamic blockie generator and share it with you. Blockies, or Ethereum identicons, are procedurally generated images that use the Ethereum wallet’s address as its seed.

Blockies are very useful for quick differentiation between Ethereum wallets. They also provide a consistent experience when dealing with different platforms and sites. This was one of the main reasons we wanted to make our blockie generator. We wanted a way to dynamically generate a blockie with different sizes for mobile and desktop use with relative ease and customizability.

To learn more about this initiative, visit our blog.

NODES

ShipChain Testnet is now in Alpha phase! This means we’re running 3 in-house validators, and actively inviting outside participants to run non-validator (“read-only”) nodes, to sync with our blockchain and help test the stability of our network.

For those uninformed about the implications, this means that we’re publicly testing the software that will eventually lead to ShipChain running its own official, secure and decentralized blockchain, using SHIP token as gas fees to fund the validators and support the security of the network.

The next phases for us will be moving the Testnet to Beta, starting in early April, where we will be electing our participants to begin validating blocks, making us “a real blockchain” supported by many external partners. Interested to know more? Sign up to participate in the Testnet Support Group chatroom on Gitter.

Don’t forget to inquire about the Preferred Operator program, coming later this month, which allows dedicated partners to commit to a long-term relationship running the nodes, and be rewarded for their participation with a sum of 100,000 SHIP tokens after a year of successful testing and feedback!

Once we finish the Testnet phases, we’ll continue to stress test and develop on the Testnet until we reach peak confidence in the operation; it might be a few weeks or a few months, but after everything is locked down and we feel fully prepared, we’ll launch our mainnet blockchain, bonded and secured by real SHIP tokens, and begin to allow any token holder to “delegate” their tokens in support of the nodes that they feel bring the most security to the network. Delegates will share in the validator rewards pool because voting for secure nodes and ensuring network stability is everybody’s responsibility! Welcome to the future of decentralized logistics!

A Look Ahead for 2019

We have several new initiatives in the works that we will be rolling out in the coming year. Read on for a sneak peek.

AMBASSADOR PROGRAM

We are also excited to announce our new ambassador program! We are currently looking for truckers to join our team and help spread the word about ShipChain. We will offer competitive incentives and rewards in exchange for you installing the platform in your trucks and sharing your honest feedback with your audiences. The ideal candidate would have:

2+ years of driving experience

A large social media following and preferably their own YouTube channel

A passion for trucking

Think you might be a good fit? Email us at marketing@shipchain.io .

PUBLIC SHIPCHAIN DEMO

Additionally, we are currently working on creating a public demo of our platform that we plan to share on our YouTube page. We know a lot of you in our community are interested in seeing our platform in action and so we hope to have this available soon. Please keep a look out on our social media channels for information about when this will be released.

TRUCK WRAP PILOT

We have shipped the Axle Gateway to our partners in California and we are happy to announce that it is working and transmitting data properly. We were quickly met with a request for a second, so we are currently working on building and shipping the second box. Once we believe sufficient information has been collected and will continue to be collected, we will be making the tracking public and providing a webpage to view the shipments as close to real-time as security will allow.

In the coming weeks, we hope to also provide the truckers with access to our mobile app, which will add increased direct shipment control, as well as a user interface that will allow the shipments to updated more regularly.

In addition, we are also working with the trucking partners to gain access to their ELD and other telemetrics devices, which will provide additional data that can be used to analyze routes and driving patterns.

BIG PICTURE

“With our Testnet in Alpha, being accepted into Plug and Play’s accelerator, our work with Scanlog, and everything else going on behind the scenes, it’s been an active past couple months. We’re excited to be delivering our working product to truly make the logistics industry more decentralized, secure, and visible. I am so proud to say that we are continuing to meet and surpass all of our milestones thus far and am very optimistic to see what the rest of the year has in store for us” – John Monarch, CEO.