Shipping containers may not sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but there is an ICO about to get underway that looks very promising indeed and it is called Blockshipping.io.

Currently there are significant problems in the shipping container industry, with large inefficiencies and a number of companies facing financial difficulties.

Blockshipping are proposing a new blockchain-based solution to these various inefficiencies and estimate they could save the industry over $5.7bn per year, as well as reducing global CO2 emissions by more than 4.6m tonnes annually. So this could be a win-win for the shipping industry and the planet — as well as potentially for investors in the ICO.

What is particularly interesting about this ICO is that they are offering a token with a payout, which as followers of my Crypto Dividends Portfolio will know, I am a big fan of.

So below I will take a look at what Blockshipping is all about, how their system will work and details of the ICO.

What Blockshipping Is All About

The global container shipping industry currently makes up about 60% of seaborne trade and its value is estimated at $12tn per year. However, the industry is rife with inefficiencies and faces problems of overcapacity, security threats, a lack of digitisation and increasing environmental regulation.

Blockshipping are proposing a new system — the Global Shared Container Platform (or GSCP for short) — and it will provide solutions to a myriad of problems, namely:

• A Complete Registry — surprisingly, at the moment there is no registry or tracking system for the 27 million shipping containers around the world. So Blockshipping intend to create such a register, which will allow the locations of all the containers to be tracked using IoT technology.
• Payment Platform — Blockshipping will povide a payment platform for all parties, allowing a much simpler process, reducing admin and costs.
• Greybox Opportunity — at the moment, a lot of containers are left empty or half-empty, costing up to $5bn per year. Using Blockshipping’ strusted platform, companies will be able to match up opportunities where they can share containers or use empty ones.
• Street Turn Opportunity — the term “street turn” means empty containers are moved from importers to exporters without an intermediate stop at a port or inland depot. Currently it is challenging to do this but with Blockshipping’s registry and tracking facilities, they plan to facilitate this more easily and save up to $750m per year.
• Reduce Container Fleet —currently companies simply don’t know where a lot of their containers are due to a lack of tracking and therefore have oversupply issues. Blockshipping’s technology would allow a reduction of 15–20% in container numbers by using real-time tracking information.
• Automated Processes — outdated businesses processes involve lots of paperwork and inefficiencies. Again Blockshipping’s approach would tackle these with automated technologies, providing considerable savings in the process.

So as you can see, they would provide multiple benefits to the shipping container industry and radically reduce costs and inefficiencies. If successful they could transform a huge market, which would be quite an achievement.

The Token Model — Two Tokens

As mentioned earlier, one of the most exciting aspects of the Blockshipping project is that they are offering a token with payout. However, there are in fact two tokens being provided by the Blockshipping project. These are:

• Container Crypto Coin (CCC) — an ERC-20 Ethereum-based token with revenues from the project shared with token holders.
• Container Platform Token (CPT) — these are the tokens that will be used internally on the platform to pay transaction fees and will have a fixed value in US Dollar terms.

In terms of the CCC, here is how the revenue sharing model will work:

Initially, 20% of the gross revenue from transaction fees paid in CPT on the GSCP platform will be distributed to CCC token holders. The percentage will drop as revenue rises however, on the following basis:

• $0 to $0.5m per month in revenue = 20% revenue share
• $0.5m to $1m per month in revenue = 15% revenue share
• $1m to $1.5m per month in revenue = 10% revenue share
• $1.5m to $2m per month in revenue = 5% revenue share
• $2m to $2.5m per month in revenue = 3% revenue share
• $2.5m and above = 1% revenue share

So they estimate that payouts could start out at a yearly ROI of around 1.42% in 2019, growing to over 10% p.a. by 2022. This all depends of course on how much revenue they generate, which remains to be seen but it is good to see they are offering a revenue-sharing model.

They plan to pay out the revenue in CCC tokens via a reverse Dutch auction model (once all the CCCs are used up).

ICO Details

The public sale begins on 14th May 2018, with the pre-sale already underway. The key information for the ICO is as follows:

· Start date:14 May 2018

· End date: 14th June 2018

· Token: Container Crypto Coin (CCC)

· Platform: Ethereum ERC-20

· Price: Fixed at $0.62 per CCC throughout token sale

· Soft cap: n/a

· Hard cap: 40m tokens, $24.8m

· Currencies accepted: ETH, BTC

· Minimum investment: $100 equivalent

Token distribution

Tokens will be allocated as follows:

· Pre-sale: 10%

· Token sale: 70%

· Founders and employees: 5%

· Advisors and partners: 10%

· Bonus for pre- and public sales: 5%

ICO Ratings

The ICO has received some very good ratings from ICO review sites, including the following:-

• ICO Bench: 4/5
• Track ICO: 5/5
• ICO Street: 4.8/5
• ICO Marks: 8.3/10
• ICO Bazaar: 4/5
• Found ICO: 7.8/10

Overall then a strong set of ratings there, ranging from good to excellent.

Conclusion

This is an impressive project from a genuine company with a great deal of experience in their field. The team looks strong and they have already secured backing from the Danish Maritime Foundation amongst others.

The shipping container industry does seem like an industry ripe for disruption and Blockshipping have identified some key areas where technology and blockchain could help address inefficiencies. From that point of view it is well-thought out and the Whitepaper is very comprehensive.

They have an ambitious goal to achieve 60% market penetration of 16 million containers being covered within 4 years. Whether this will be achieved remains to be seen, but apparently they already have strong interest from some of the world’s largest shipping container companies.

It is good to see a revenue sharing model included in the business plan, although it is a shame that the percentage shared with token holders will decrease as revenue increases. It would have been better to see this remain at 20%, or at least not drop so dramatically, but no doubt they have to factor in the revenue share in their business models to ensure they are still profitable.

In any event, this looks like one of the stronger ICOs there has been recently and I would not be surprised to see it sell out.

You can check out the Blockshipping ICO here