Greetings from the ICON Team,

On May 28th, the Korea Customs Service hosted an MOU ceremony with eight other organizations including Nomad Connection, Matrix2b, CJ Korea Express, and Lotte Global Logistics. The ‘Blockchain based Customs Clearance Platform’ will be utilizing loopchain, the underlying blockchain technology used by ICON and several other companies and consortiums in South Korea.

loopchain has been used in a variety of projects such as ChainID, a blockchain based identity authentication service being utilized in Samsung Pass and by a consortium of financial institutions.

A blockchain based network is an excellent solution to streamline the customs process, from initial order to import declaration. This can be done by running nodes across each part of the process, which includes e-commerce, shipping and courier companies.

While blockchains are often transparent to all participating parties, loopchain has an important tiered structure allowing for only authorized entities to access certain information throughout the process. (An explanation of this tiered system can be found on page 23 of the ICON white paper)

Korea Customs Service (KCS) has applied blockchain technology in hopes to grow the direct purchasing of foreign goods. It takes too much time and money to report a small volume of e-commerce sales. As a result, KCS has taken the first step in establishing blockchain based e-commerce clearing services with the goal of providing prompt and accurate data validation. When the blockchain based e-commerce platform is established, it will not only lower logistics costs, but also mitigate the threat of illegal activities such as smuggling and false reporting.

KCS plans to launch a pilot by the end of the year, and apply blockchain technology to all e-commerce import and export services shortly thereafter. We are looking forward to seeing yet another real-world use case of blockchain technology come to fruition.

Thank you

Hyperconnect the World