The Eximchain project was kicked off in 2015 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by a team with decades of academic and industry experience in computer science, banking and global supply chain across the world. Our team’s vision is to use blockchain technology to bring the global supply chain into the digital era and lower financing barriers for small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Today we are very excited to announce the release of our white paper, which covers our plan for creating a platform where every participant in the ecosystem can build customized supply chain finance (SCF) solutions secured by a novel governance mechanism designed for public, permissioned chains.
Innovations in SCF have traditionally been driven by large corporations and banks in the field; however, cutting edge financial technologies offer new opportunities to extend the benefits of SCF to businesses of all sizes. According to a 2015 McKinsey Report, of the $20 billion potential revenue pool that exists for implemented SCF programs, only $2 billion is being captured today. A primary issue inhibiting the widespread adoption of SCF programs among SMEs is that they currently lack a trusted tool that provides transparency to eliminate information asymmetry problems. Eximchain uses blockchain technologies to address this challenge by offering a platform for SMEs to implement turnkey smart contract-based SCF solutions on a permissioned fork of Ethereum supporting data privacy. The Eximchain ecosystem will enable SMEs to gain access to affordable funding sources and achieve profit maximization by giving financiers visibility into the supply chain cash flow.
Instead of building an ecosystem on Bitcoin or Ethereum, we chose to design a new consensus protocol that forks Quorum* to add a quadratic voting-based governance model, which secures the block proposal mechanism with a finite amount of time. Our goal is to build a public, permissioned blockchain that grants developers, and initial token holders, a privileged position in the consensus protocol of the underlying blockchain, eventually incentivizing and funding developer pools to add functionality to the ecosystem.
Recent developments in permissioned-DLT have enabled us to design novel consensus rules that allow for a fundamental change in the underlying incentive mechanism and actors that make up the consensus protocol of permissioned, public chains. Ultimately we believe the incentives of developer pools, clients, and corporates contributing value to the ecosystem must be aligned at the protocol level.
We’re currently working with SMEs in China who want to be a part of our ecosystem to launch the testnet and we plan to launch token sales soon. The opportunity that these technologies will unlock for business of all sizes is remarkable and we need public involvement to fulfill that mission.
We invite engagement and dialog on our business model and our ecosystem design. To become a part of our community, to give us feedback on the whitepaper, or just to find out more about Eximchain: visit our website at
www.eximchain.com or whitepaper:
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/eximchainwhitepaper/eximchain-supply-chain+V1.0.pdf
