For those of you who spend time in our Discord, you’ll know I strongly encourage coins that have substantial real-world uses that are simple to explain and will make a business or customer go, “I want that!” Focused projects that blockchain excels in are some of my favorite projects, as I think they’re the ones that will reach a real adoption level before anything else. Two such projects I feel are on the right track for this are Ambrosus (AMB) and Modum (MOD).
Both companies are focusing on the idea of tracking perishable goods, with pharmaceuticals and foods being at the core. With ever-expanding world trade and increasing regulations imposed on transporting perishable goods of all kinds, tech that focuses on ensuring the quality of said products is a massive boon to any company working in those fields — immutable ledgers were made for upgrading supply chains. Both tokens have the ability to monitor temperatures and track locations, and both have embedded anti-tampering effects. While those features might sound like something minor to an outsider, they are at the core of delivering goods. A supplier offering the ability to track their goods from production to delivery is an incredibly exciting proposal for point-of-sale companies.
Not only can these coins ensure the integrity of products and that they’ve maintained their quality in an acceptable environment throughout the supply chain, but they can also check on the direct status of individual orders with incredible ease. IoT technology combined with coins like AMB and MOD is a massive jump in the transportation industry, which is one of the single most significant global industries, period. This kind of tech is the perfect application and merger of blockchain with the real world. You know exactly where your product has been every step of the way; you know for a fact that this is the exact item you ordered. In the pharmaceutical industry, this means the complete elimination of counterfeit products – and frankly, that’s a huge deal.
Meanwhile over in food transportation, we’ve suddenly found this fantastic tech to help prevent those scandals you hear about in the news. So many products require a consistent temperature from origin to delivery point to ensure quality and safety. If someone leaves a carton of eggs out for too long, it’s incredibly easy for it to spoil along the way and become dangerous with very simple negligence. With this style of tech, you can avoid all of that. Merely slap your sensor onto the product, scan it into the app, and ship away.
When the distributor or retailer receives the product, they scan it on their end and get every single piece of information about that product, guaranteeing the quality of the products they’re able to offer their customers. Given that knowledge, what consumer would choose to shop with any company that doesn’t provide this service? Why buy pills from Pharma X when Pharma Y has a detailed history-of-care for their products that ensure the highest quality?
Who would want to feed their children eggs from a supermarket that doesn’t offer this safety feature against one who does? Why would you ever risk feeding your children a potential life-threatening product? And make no mistake; foodborne illnesses are hell to live through, as anyone who’s ever suffered through one will tell you. We can guarantee the safety of any and all food products in this system, and that’s a massive step forward for the industry. However, that’s just one significant advantage this system offers, and while it might be the biggest boon to consumers, it’s not the only one.
On the back-end, we’re talking massively simplified shipping methodologies and man-hours, as these products cut out a vast amount of required safety checks. It’s an area I can see smart contracts working readily and quickly, and also allows for a massive cut-down on man-hours in checking products at every step on their journey. Simple scans of the smart contract at any point allow for a complete history from the sensor, and since it’s on the blockchain, they can’t be fabricated. Those scans happened in real-time and are easily verifiable.
This is the first significant step along the way to total automation in the transportation industry as well — something many are likely to overlook! With sensors loaded and a smart contract created for the product at its origin point, you can go a step farther and talk about sealed shipping crates from origin to distribution centers. This means an auto-loader can handle everything, and all anyone needs to do is scan the shipping container at any point of transit to verify the contents and quality of the products! Smart contracts remove the tampering factors, and the sensors ensure quality control! When you start to factor in the future of automated drivers and automated loading docks, you’re talking about helping to simplify a massive step in the transportation industry that could save BILLIONS every year!
This is the kind of tech that’s going to put blockchain on the map and make companies jump at the chance to use it more so than anything else. When people ask you for use-cases of blockchain or smart contracts, these are the exact type of projects you should talk. You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who can provide a valid argument against this type of usage, outside of arguing that this could all be accomplished on a private blockchain. But considering the global nature of these industries, a public blockchain that allows everyone to interact with each other quickly and efficiently is far superior to a siloed one.
Now, as far as which of these products are superior I leave up to you, the reader, to discern for yourself. Both of them have unique features touted towards community usage and how they interact as a cryptocurrency/token, but that’s not the focus of this article. As always, I’d implore you to do your research into which one of these coins you think is superior, but both should give you good cause to grant their whitepapers a hard look.
