Global Share is a company dedicated to improving business processes and Zircon Tech has been a key partner in Argentina in the implementation of blockchain technology in the architecture of a solution for the preparation, issuance, signature, transmission, negotiation and presentation of the Electronic Bill of Lading (e-BL).



According to Machin from Zircon Tech, “The synergy between cutting-edge technology and professional experience in supply chains, logistics and commercial networks, allows Global Share to offer a spectrum of optimization tools and solutions to improve processes. This company incorporated blockchain technology to the e-BL platform to position edoxOnline in the top podium category of companies that provide such functionality within a secure environment”.

"Solutions such as the electronic Bill of Lading (e-BL), the electronic phytosanitary certificate (e-Phyto) and the electronic certificate of origin (e-OC) are encompassing international commodity trade, helping all trading companies to be digitized while streamlining the entire process of issuing shipping documents", he added.

Zircon Tech assisted Global Share in the implementation of the solution that tracks documentation changes over time and seeks to ensure that the information cannot be changed. Zircon Tech proposed to identify the documents via hashes (SHA256) and then leave them "notarized" on the Ethereum blockchain, using a document id and the mentioned hash. Each change to the document is logged using the corresponding ID and hash update. For this project, a smart contract with Solidity and an API with Node JS were developed.

"Global Share is confident that edoxOnline's electronic Bill of Lading (e-BL) will meet its customers' business needs and expectations, paperless and efficiently," concluded Machin.

What is Blockchain technology?

If during the last months you have heard about Blockchain and how it is going to revolutionize the future, surely you have wondered what this technology consists of. Blockchain is a public, shared and decentralized database that works like a book where purchase-sale operations or any other type of transaction are recorded.

This concept may seem somewhat complex, so let's take an example to illustrate it better. You can imagine Blockchain as an account book with copies distributed by a large number of computers. Operations that depend on results obtained in previous operations are noted on each page of the book.

Trying to alter that registry has two major drawbacks: A change in an entry means modifying all the following pages in cascade. Also, for the change to actually occur it would have to be done in all existing copies of the book. These two things together make it practically impossible to alter the data of one of this chain of blocks. In addition, the use of cryptography allows it to be impossible to know who made the transaction or where it came from, thus guaranteeing the privacy of users.

Blockchain technology was originally used as an accounting method for the virtual currency Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that is not endorsed by any bank or central authority and that uses Blockchain to ensure the security of transactions.
If there are no banks or regulatory bodies, who controls Bitcoin transactions? Well, thanks to Blockchain technology, it is the users who make up the Bitcoin network the ones who control it. Each transaction is replicated in all the nodes that make up the network, creating a public and easily verifiable accounting.

However, it seems that the use of Blockchain does not finish taking off, probably due to the distrust of users towards cryptocurrencies. Are we facing the technology of the future or a new bubble? Only time will tell.

Furthermore, trust is another intrinsic characteristic of the system. From the legal point of view, bitcoin would be a patrimonial, private, intangible, digital asset, in the form of a unit of account, created through a computer system and used as a common measure of value by agreement of the users of the system. It is a movable, fungible, identifiable and unrepeatable but divisible good. But it is not money, it is not electronic money nor does it have movable value, it would be «patrimonial assets that are taken as a common measure of value in closed, cooperative and decentralized economic exchange systems, unrelated to state fiduciary money, and based on the trust and agreement of the users of the system”. For many law experts, unregulated bitcoin will not become a currency for general use as a means of payment.