Can blockchain technology revolutionise the shipping industry?

Shipping. Blockchain. The two words do not traditionally sit easily together, or at all. The shipping industry has a proud history of several thousand years. Blockchain technology goes back only 12 years. However, in IT terms, blockchain technology is old technology. And it’s potential “glory days” in terms of revolutionising the shipping industry are still ahead of it, explain Hill Dickinson’s Mark Weston and Michael French

Blockchain is a type of technology where a database is made up of records stored, updated and accessed simultaneously across multiple locations in real time. Traditional databases are centralised in one place and run by a single person or organisation. But a blockchain database decentralises all the data in the database so that there is no single master copy of the database, no single authority who authorises changes to it and, most importantly, no possibility of anyone changing information in it.