Amphorium Global Logistics Blockchain Overview

February 17, 2022

About Amphorium

Logistics is a conservative industry in which, over the past decades, the scheme of transportation of goods has remained practically unchanged, retaining a vast number of intermediaries. Drivers, freight forwarders, customs officers, and officials are just a small range of people who can interact with the product until the moment it falls into the hands of the end consumer.

According to our data, it takes from 10% to 45% of the total cost of shipping the goods to pay for the services of intermediaries. However, such a high price does not guarantee the quality of the services provided. On the contrary, the more people participate in the process, the higher the likelihood of problems: the cargo can be damaged, lost, or delivered much later. In addition, there is a risk that contractors speaking different languages may fill out the documents incorrectly, which will lead to the freezing of the cargo for an indefinite period.

As a result, the international transport of goods becomes an expensive, inefficient, and time-consuming process that requires changes.

Considering that companies from the logistics sector are in no hurry to implement innovative solutions to optimize their internal processes, the Amphorium ecosystem offers a different way. It helps the entire industry develop without changing the internal business model of individual companies, which became possible thanks to the use of blockchain technology.

What is Amphorium logistics?

Amphorium is a decentralized logistics mobile application primarily aimed at end users — ordinary people and entrepreneurs who send and receive goods. DApp empowers users to optimize all logistics processes and makes the supply chain simple, transparent, and completely secure.

Amphorium is an aggregator of postal and insurance companies on a single blockchain. With its help, each user can choose the best offer for themselves in terms of cost, conditions, and terms, make a calculation and apply for cargo transportation.

Areas in which Amphorium will be helpful:

Multimodal transportation;
International delivery of goods;
Delivery by air;
Cargo transportation;
Intraport forwarding;
Rail transportation;
Cargo insurance.

Due to the use of official APIs, the information presented in Amphorium will always be up-to-date. All actions for sending and managing a package are performed within one application, without going to third-party sites.

After the dispatch, the user can track the location of their parcel and the stage of its registration online. If necessary, the Amphorium blockchain makes it possible to control special transportation conditions: temperature, air humidity, and other parameters, especially when transporting specific categories of goods, such as food.

Resolving security issues

To ensure network security, Amphorium uses the Proof of Stake and Proof of Transfer consensus mechanisms and other decentralized tools. This allows you to create all the conditions for conducting honest and transparent business worldwide.

The relationship between the sender and the recipient of goods in the Amphorium ecosystem is based on the Smart Contract technology. Its difference from traditional contracts lies in the complete automation of mutual settlements between the parties. A smart contract is a program code part of the blockchain, which contains information about a deal in the format: “If … then”. If the “If” condition is met, the second party pays the funds. Otherwise, they are returned to the payer. Since the script is executed automatically, without the participation of third parties, the cost and execution time of such transactions is minimized, and the risks associated with the human factor are absent.

Smart Contract is a more technological and inexpensive alternative to cash on delivery when the recipient, to protect themselves from fraud shipments, is forced to pay not only for the transportation of goods but also for the return of funds.

By using Smart Contracts, the parties to the transaction can get rid of expensive intermediaries such as banks, payment services, lawyers, and brokers. This will lead to faster and more efficient interactions and help the business grow much faster. In addition, the need for additional workers in the supply chain disappears (those responsible for making advance payments, controlling settlements, informing about the occurrence of certain events, etc.), which leads to savings human resources. By reducing the overuse of paper transactions, companies can reduce shipping costs by up to 20%.

In addition, Amphorium digitizes the entire document flow on its network and provides users with documentation and receipts in the form of .pdf or .jpeg files. For the documents to have real legal force in different countries, their signing is carried out using an electronic digital signature, EDS.

Protection of personal information

Dozens of people from different countries can interact with the cargo in the supply chain, so the issue of personal data security in the field of logistics is especially acute. Amphorium solves this problem with decentralization tools.

The Amphorium blockchain is based on zk-SNARK and zk-STARK zero-knowledge cryptographic protocols. The principle of their work is based on the fact that the parties to the transaction can prove the veracity of any statement without disclosing any data. The primary purpose of such evidence is that both parties, without revealing any information to each other, can trustfully interact and conclude secure transactions, which fundamentally changes the idea of maintaining confidentiality.

Such protocols have a minimum size of just one bit where the meaning “true” or “false” is encrypted. Consequently, zk-SNARKs do not overload the blockchain network and are instantly processed.

For all its advantages, the zk-SNARK protocols are computationally based. This means that the likelihood of them being hacked is minimal. Also, hacking requires enormous computing power, which, in theory, only quantum computers are capable of.

Zk-STARK protocols offer a cheaper and faster implementation of the same technology, which is achieved by maintaining the same number of data exchange cycles between verifiers at any level of computation.

Economics and payments in the Amphorium ecosystem

All settlements within the Amphorium platform will be carried out using AMH tokens, which makes using smart contracts straightforward. At the moment, the system provides three types of payments:

for insurance;
for the transportation of cargo;
for goods — cash on delivery.

To ensure the operability of the project at the time of launch and in the future, the total supply was set at 1,000,000,000 coins, some of which will be sold to investors at three investment stages.

Application store on Amphorium blockchain

Scaling Amphorium will occur due to the introduction of new smart contracts and decentralized open-source applications into the system. This will allow each member of the network to refine and improve existing solutions and will enable the project to develop naturally. It is planned to open the Amphorium dApps Store — an application store on the Amphorium blockchain.

Unlike traditional applications, DApps do not have points of failure and lack hidden functionality and censorship. That is, they obey only the blockchain rules approved by the network participants. This makes their use completely safe and convenient.

Amphorium benefits

Amphorium uses decentralized technology to transform the logistics system worldwide to make it transparent and secure. The main advantages of the project: