Blockchain Papers

Zui Xu, Mei Sha, Dayong Yu, Shuang Li · 6 authors

Introduction Shippers may undeclare maritime dangerous goods as general cargo to avoid the preparation time, documentation burden, and freight premium associated with dangerous goods transportation, creating serious risks for vessel safety, port operations, and the marine environment. This paper examines whether blockchain-enabled documentation can mitigate such undeclaration by improving provenance information and shortening preparation and verification time in the dangerous goods channel. Methods We develop a game-theoretic model with one carrier and a continuum of heterogeneous shippers who differ in their marginal willingness to pay for service level, and in which the carrier endogenously sets the dangerous goods transportation price. We characterize the equilibrium declaration behavior under a benchmark scenario and under blockchain adoption, and extend the model to settings with carrier competition and enhanced detection. Results Undeclaration motives vary with the service environment: when dangerous goods service is relatively low, service-sensitive shippers undeclare to access the faster generalcargo channel; when service is sufficiently high, price-sensitive shippers undeclare to avoid the dangerous goods tariff. The carrier’s profit-maximizing price therefore does not generally coincide with the regulatory objective of zero undeclaration. Blockchain adoption introduces two opposing forces: a service-enhancement effect that encourages truthful declaration and a cost-escalation effect that raises the dangerous goods price. As a result, blockchain reduces undeclaration only when documentation-time savings dominate the price premium induced by adoption costs; when this condition fails, adoption may increase undeclaration and reduce compliant shipper surplus. Discussion Blockchain-enabled documentation is not a universal safety remedy. Its effect on undeclaration depends on the interaction between documentation-time savings and the adoption-driven price increase, and the extensions with carrier competition and enhanced detection show that blockchain deployment should be evaluated jointly with pricing, detection, competition, and regulatory policies.

SAMIULLAH KHAIRY, M. Falcitelli

Background: Maritime container shipping carries over 80% of global trade, yet compliance verification creates a confidentiality–verifiability conflict: carriers treat telemetry as commercially sensitive, while regulators, insurers, and port authorities require verifiable proof that cargo remained within specification. The EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) mandates Digital Product Passports (DPPs), but no standardised DPP architecture exists for the multi-stakeholder maritime domain. Methods: We present Ocean DPP, a blockchain-anchored platform combining GS1 EPCIS 2.0, oneM2M, IOTA, and Groth16 zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), letting stakeholders verify compliance predicates without revealing raw sensor values; Merkle-tree batching reduces anchoring costs. We evaluate it in 16 experiments on a single-host testbed using synthetic workloads and a local IOTA network. Results: The platform achieved 95th-percentile latency of 48 ms without ZKP and 500 ms with proof generation, throughput of 7 events/s per host, 304 ms mean proof generation and 9.8 ms verification, 100% EPCIS 2.0 compliance, and zero permanent message loss across four failure-injection scenarios; horizontal scaling reduced the median latency by 37%. Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge, Ocean DPP is the first implemented, quantitatively evaluated platform integrating EPCIS 2.0, oneM2M, IOTA, and Groth16 ZKPs for privacy-preserving maritime DPPs; broader multi-host and public-network validation remains for future work.