ShipX: blockchain logistics monitoring for the USPS

The shipping/logistics industry was one of the hardest industries behind the healthcare and hospitality to be hit by COVID-19. Monitoring parcels and facilitating transactions through smart contracts will help in the on-going relief efforts as well as helping the demand for parcel delivery workers.

What it does

This smart contract takes addresses and regions in a country and stores data on the blockchain through Stratis as a a single source of ground truth for stakers and dApplication developers to use in their own applications for monitoring behavior and logistics trends. As well as allowing parcel workers to earn more for delivering packages, incentivizing them through on-time deliveries.

This helps improve transparency and traceability of logistics network/supply chains and can also be used in addition with IoT devices that monitor temperature/humidity of sensitive packages to reveal insights in combination with stored address/tracking number data stored through the smart contract on Stratis.

How I built it

I used C# for the smart contracts and Svelte.js for the frontend UI. Stratis smart contracts are tricky because not too many outside dependencies and services can be used in combination with the kit but I added a USPS HTTP Api Client, because it was necessary for the smart contract to work.

I also used the bitcore-lib with web3 for the dApp. It was interesting building a C# program without namespaces, but it was necessary for the application to work.

What's next for ShipX

As I made further investigation in the whole logistics ecosystem and what it is built of, I found out that it's really complicated and has many challenges and full of potential cases, that could be improved with help of collection of data and by making analysis out of it (using Stratis of course)

Everything is still a work in progress, so expect iteration and polishing for the near future. :)