Citizens Reserve, the high tech startup led by several entrepreneurs and former Deloitte blockchain executives, has unveiled SUKU, an industry-agnostic supply chain solution aimed at tackling the issues of transparency, efficiency, and product visibility in legacy systems.
A blockchain-based platform, SUKU expects to open new markets, improve operations and reduce the cost of running supply chains.
The SUKU ecosystem intends to provide key advantages to trading partners such as access to real-time, transparent data around the precise location of goods, the privacy of partners, a bid and order marketplace, auditability of activities and the automation of contractual agreements.
“The current supply chain environment is complex and difficult to navigate. Almost all enterprises require a supply chain to some extent, but the technology supporting them remains expensive, inefficient and fragmented. With SUKU, we’re planning to build the decentralized supply chain as-a-service platform that can span across industries, enabling our trading partners to interact in a way that’s been all but impossible up until now.”
With today’s businesses often working with myriad partners on a global scale, the challenges presented by supply chain management are increasingly vast. Whether locating a Chinese supplier, or finding a carrier to haul products from LA to Toronto, these challenges are amplified by the lack of one global governing body or a set of standards to ensure end-to-end visibility.
Eric Piscini continued, “Recent contentious incidents such as the Chinese pharmaceutical scandals have showcased the need for one layer of connection for trading partners to communicate and transact. From hardware to energy, all industries utilizing a supply chain take risks working with untrusted partners. The true value of a decentralized ecosystem comes in its nature of being trustless and having no single point of failure.”
SUKU’s unique ‘supply chain-as-a-service’ concept expects to eradicate the three primary obstacles in supply-chain by providing visibility of products, access to capital and innovation, and engagement between stakeholders. In order to bring greater visibility to the supply chain, SUKU aims to display the precise location and status of goods in real-time, which is essential in ensuring that all parties can act proactively, instead of reactively when an issue arises.
Designed to be industry-agnostic, from farming, to pharmaceuticals, to electrical goods, the SUKU platform anticipates the use of two blockchains, Ethereum and Quorum, to maximize the benefits of both networks:
- Public Ethereum blockchain: used extensively for smart contract deployments, is expected to handle supply chain payments.
- Permissioned Quorum blockchain: aims to facilitate transactions such as bids and offers, where confidentiality is critical. SUKU’s native token is necessary to incentivize and reward partners of the platform.
The platform’s built-in transparency and auditability also project to empower more socially responsible practices amongst trading partners by providing greater awareness about the provenance and origin of goods, as well as the values of the organizations they work with.