Blockchain has often been dismissed as a technology in search of a problem—a playground for cryptocurrency speculation rather than a tool for solving pressing real-world challenges. The Goods Passport ID (GPID) initiative by the Working Group Open Customs Blockchain directly challenges this notion, showcasing blockchain's practical application in streamlining clearance processes for customs authorities globally.
Typical customs authorities face numerous challenges, including duty evasion and transport of prohibited goods, often arising due to the manipulation of a few key data points. The GPID project is designed to digitally transform the customs clearance process by creating a reliable, tamper-proof dataset (digital passport) for government authorities. This passport contains only essential data—such as seller and buyer information, invoice values, and goods classification—stored on a tamper-proof blockchain.
This system fully addresses the challenges of duty evasion, and delays caused by mistrust of data. These aren’t abstract concerns—they’re first-order problems that affect countless stakeholders, from customs authorities to freight forwarders, buyers, and sellers. By providing a single, reliable reference dataset, the GPID can ensure this critical information remains authentic and verifiable throughout the global supply chain.
The GPID’s mission resonates as its conclusions align closely with what my team and I at STABILITY have been championing the past year. Michael Douglas, a lead in the GPID project, highlighted a key insight: “blockchain adoption in border processes has been delayed by issues like complexity, cost, and cross-territory acceptance.” These are similar barriers that STABILITY identified early on as the primary obstacles preventing blockchain adoption.. Another critical barrier, often overlooked, is scalability—the ability for a blockchain to process billions of daily transactions globally without compromising efficiency. Internally, we refer to these as the “Four Pillars”: 1) user experience, 2) cost, 3) regulatory concerns, and 4) scalability. These shared insights affirm the need to address these key challenges and highlight STABILITY’s unique path of solving them within a public blockchain, which most recognize holds the greatest potential for blockchain's future.
I firmly posit that for blockchain-enabled system like GPID to be successful globally, a public blockchain is the only viable infrastructure design that meets all the requirements. Blockchain’s core value lies in enabling trust and cooperation where it does not naturally exist—among multiple stakeholders, jurisdictions, and organizations with differing incentives. Private (or permissioned) blockchains can work well for internal systems or scenarios where all participants already trust one another, but have been unable to demonstrate viability in disperse global trade networks. Customs processes, by definition, require interoperability and trust between diverse set of stakeholders, making a public blockchain a natural fit.
The recent failure of TradeLens—a private blockchain platform developed by corporate behemoths IBM and Maersk—illustrates this point. Despite tracking and processing over 70 million shipping containers, and benefiting from tremendous influence over industry participants and government agencies, TradeLens ultimately was unable to attract enough participation to make it a viable network. Its eventual discontinuation last year underscores a fundamental truth: trust cannot be manufactured by centralized control. For a blockchain to solve real-world problems, with a diverse and often opposing set of stakeholders, the network must remain neutral, trustless, and open—qualities that only public blockchains can provide.
It's important to clarify a common misconception at this stage: data on public blockchains can be also be kept private. Most people don’t realize that public blockchains offer robust privacy measures to protect sensitive information. Not dissimilar to the internet, public blockchains have data encryption and selective disclosure capabilities that allow entities to control access to data, ensuring confidentiality while maintaining the benefits of an open, trustless system. The term "public" in public blockchain refers to the ability of anyone to independently verify the network's state at any time, unlike private blockchains, where access or permission is first required for such verification. Transparency does not mean "divulging all your corporate data"—it means ensuring accountability while safeguarding privacy.
Today’s public blockchains all face the hurdles of volatile costs, user complexity, and regulatory concerns, all of which prevent widespread adoption. At STABILITY, we recognized the root cause of these challenges are public blockchain’s reliance on cryptocurrency. We then launched the Global Trust Network (GTN), the market’s first feeless public blockchain free of all cryptocurrency dependencies. By removing cryptocurrency, we have eliminated transaction fees, sidestepped regulatory challenges, and simplified the user experience. Without the economic constraints imposed by cryptocurrencies, the GTN network can scale to meet the needs of enterprises and governments alike, handling billions of transactions seamlessly. Our approach ensures that public blockchains can be affordable, accessible, and compliant, making them viable for large-scale traditional applications like customs processing.
The GPID initiative highlights the real-world potential of blockchain to solve tangible problems in global trade, moving beyond mere speculation. It’s especially encouraging to see that both STABILITY and the Working Group have independently arrived at similar conclusions about the barriers to blockchain adoption. These shared insights underscore the importance of collaboration and innovation in overcoming longstanding adoption barriers. With the thoughtful design, public blockchains can enable systems that are transparent yet privacy preserving, efficient, and secure. STABILITY remains committed to making blockchain as accessible as possible, ensuring that blockchain technology fulfills its promise of fostering digital trust and transformation globally.