Reference no: EM133024143

When one thinks about all the steps that must occur, and all the co-operation required to bring a kiwi fruit to your local supermarket, it's hard not to marvel. The same goes for all the transactions needed globally, tying together thousands of suppliers across more than 30 countries required to produce an iPhone. We take all this for granted, but the scope and complexity of the planning, processes, logistics, and transactions needed to get the trading chain to work from farm to fork are simply staggering.

When looking at Blockchain technology, it was designed to permit two parties to conduct an online transaction without having to rely on an intermediary to act as a third-party intermediary (Gabinson, 2016). On the same token, international trade is a long chain of transactions that always will require trust to enable execution. Gabison (2016) states that, often, the players don't know each other, have no physical interaction, and the process has built-in lag times between delivery and payment. Currently, intermediaries bridge these gaps, but this means interacting with numerous agents specialized in enabling different parts of the trade chain (e.g., having ten parties covering the process of trade financing alone).

Lastly, while these proxies manage to build sufficient bridges where needed, they are not the perfect solution to the problem. Why is that the case? Can you share your thoughts on this?