IDEA

Managing risk remains a cornerstone of importing or exporting goods - and some key risks revolve around trust: will the buyer pay and will the seller deliver?

Today, managing these risks relies on an ecoysystem of intermediaries and layers of physical paperwork. Processes are manual and slow as a result.

Blockchain - as a "technology of trust" - holds the following possibilities in the context of international trade:

• The ability to digitally hold the title to assets.
• The ability to digitally track inspections and certifications.
• The ability to digitally record contractual arrangements and execute them alogrithmically.

More background on the use case can be found here.

With a background in international trade, I decided to try my hand at prototyping a smart contract suited for this use case.

This (d)app implements the basic flow of a blockchain-enabled trade, namely: the seller can only claim payment from buyer once a third party has validated the seller's performance on the blockchain.

Future features:

• Automated tests
• Authentication
• Adapting UI/UX and smart contract(s) to real world use case.

ARCHITECTURE

The project is being developed with the Truffle Suite.

• Ganache provides the development blockchain.
• Truffle provides a "one-stop shop" framework for smart contract development including functionality such as network management, automated testing and compilation of Solidity code.
• Drizzle provides a collection of front-end libraries that facilitate creating dapp front-ends. It encapsulates Web3 functionality and your contract methods.

Otherwise, React was used to create the front-end and Metamask is used as the Ethereum client.

A simplified idea of the architecture can ve visualized as follows:

SET UP

In the project directory, start by installing truffle

yarn global add truffle

Then, compile your solidity contracts and migrate them to the network:

truffle compile
truffle migrate

Then, change your working directory to the client and install yarn packages:

cd client
yarn install

Then, download Ganache (to run a test blockchain on your machine) and make sure you have Metamask installed on your Chrome browser.

On Metamask, chose to connect to a local network by clicking on the top-right circle. Ensure that the localhost ports are set to the same in Ganache, Metamask and the truffle-config.js file.

The interface should now be visible. You can create multiple accounts on Metamask to simulate usage by distinct nodes.

Notes for usage:

• Enter buyer, seller and carrier as Ethereum addresses.
• Once the contract is created, you can click on it to render it on the table on the right.

This project was undertaken in my time as a student at Code Chrysalis