Finnish city receives €2.4 million to test blockchain in transport

Rage Comment : INTERREG Central Baltic, the EU organization responsible for allocating European Regional Development Funds, has funded the SmartLog project and invested 2.4 million euros in the Finnish city of Kouvola to simplify the supply chain using blockchain. What makes this project different is that it will set up blockchain smart contracts for containers, giving them limited decision-making power. Kouvola is a core logistics distribution center connecting the EU, Russia, and Asia, and there are many logistics companies in the city. It is not difficult to imagine that this project will have a great impact on the overall logistics industry in the region.

Translation: Annie_Xu

The economic development company owned by the Finnish city of Kouvola has received €2.4 million to pay for a project to streamline supply chains using blockchain.

Kouvola Innovation will use the funding over three years to combine enterprise resource planning tools to enable the trucking, warehousing and freight forwarding industries to better manage their supply chains.

While the usual approach is to build a single, immutable record product to simplify the supply chain, the difference this time is that smart contracts are set up for containers.

Mika Lammi

Mika Lammi, Head of IoT Business Development at Kouvola Innovation, said:

"One of the goals of this project is to use the trust and data integrity features of blockchain, simply put, smart contracts, to give containers limited decision-making power, including route planning, bidding for transportation contracts, etc."

The project, called SmartLog, was set up earlier this month by the European Union INTERREG Central Baltic, which allocates €115 million from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The EU agency invests in cross-border cooperation projects in Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Sweden.

Global Applications

The project includes a $9.9 billion global supply chain software industry development plan and has become an innovation target for the blockchain community.

In February, Lammi gave a speech together with Tim Hahn, chief architect for IoT security at IBM, on how blockchain could streamline business in the Finnish transport industry and beyond.

According to the speech, Kouvola is a core logistics distribution center connecting the European Union, Russia and Asia. There are more than 200 logistics companies in the city and more than 500 logistics companies in the surrounding Kymenlaakso area.

The proof of concept for the SmartLog project began in September with the goal of building a global blockchain platform for the logistics industry that would provide the ability to dynamically manage routes for containers.

In addition, Skuchain in Mountain View, California, USA, received investment from Aminon, FBS Capital and Digital Currency Group to use blockchain to simplify supply chain finance. Provenance in London, UK, received seed round financing to use smartphones to scan barcodes to simplify the supply chain of grocery stores.

IBM and Hyperledger

In February, Kouvolo Innovation became one of the first members of IBM's blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS), joining at the same time as the London Stock Exchange.

Lammi noted that the city government agency joined IBM’s Partnership Beta Program to provide feedback on the beta version of the blockchain platform.

Lammi hopes that after SmartLog is completed, it will use Hyperledger’s blockchain technology.

"I can only say that IBM engineers have indeed developed something useful, and this technology is quite amazing."