FedEx Integrating Blockchain in Association With Transport Alliance

FedEx has begun developing a set of industry standards for blockchain usage as part of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA), FreightWaves, a cargo shipping news outlet, reported.

Kevin Humphries, senior vice president of IT at FedEx Services, said, “One of our focuses has always been to find innovative ways to provide the kind of visibility that our customers need to get all the information up and down the supply chain. And blockchain is opening the door to that by giving customers even more visibility to their package before it gets in our hands and after it leaves our hands.”

Dale Chrystie, vice president of strategic planning & analysis at FedEx Freight, said, “Our early work is in dispute resolution, where we have customers both upstream and downstream from us, trying to speak back in a common language.”

The project hopes to establish what data would be needed for a permanent ledger to ease disputes between customers sending and receiving goods through FedEx, according to him.

Humphries said he was “hopeful that blockchain will have many use cases,” while Chrystie concludes that, “we think blockchain is a fantastic technology coming along, and we certainly want to play in this space.”

This news comes after a high-profile cyber attack on FedEx’s TNT express branch in Europe last year.