While the whole world is watching the "roller coaster" course bitcoin, less attention is paid to the technology behind it - the blockade. At the same time, in the right hands, a blockage can bring a significant profit not only to the owners of crypto-currencies or the startups starting at ICO, but also, for example, to the oil trading market. Now, crude oil is supplied mainly through over-the-counter transactions. They are supplemented by exchange trade in forwards, futures and other derivatives of financial instruments. At the same time, pricing is considered close to fair, as it is formed on the basis of supply and demand in open electronic tenders. But the quotes of only three sorts-benchmarks are determined: Brent, WTI and Dubai, which in 2016 accounted for only about 5% of the world oil production. The prices for the remaining tens of brands of raw materials are determined using a discount / premium to these benchmarks. Market "fairness" of such quotations is very doubtful due to the lack of transparent trading platforms and more intermediaries. This can, in turn, lead to manipulation of information in the market, where every dollar in the price turns into multi-million loss, both for the supplier and for the consumer. The leapfrog with a large number of documents that need to be formalized for oil deliveries also leads to unpredictable increases in the timing of contract execution and transaction costs Investments in block-start-ups for 2017 are estimated at $ 3 billion and, of course, the crude oil market of $ 1.7 trillion is not managed to stay away from this process. So Natixis, IBM and Trafigura launched in 2017. pilot trading platform for oil sales in the US. And at the beginning of the year Mercuria tested the supply of oil from Africa to China through the European trading platform Easy Trading Connect, created by the banks ING and Societe Generale. The experiment demonstrated a significant increase in the speed of the transaction and a decrease in transaction costs. So the banks were able to shorten the time for each operation from several hours to 25 minutes. For traders, the efficiency increased by 33%. The success of Easy Trading Connect led to the creation of a blocking consortium aimed at developing and testing tools to simplify transaction management and tracking.

It was attended by the largest international oil companies BP, Shell and Statoil, trading houses Guvnor Group, Mercuria Energy Group and Koch Supply & Trading, as well as banks ABN Amro, ING and Societe Generale. It is expected that the new tools will reduce the time of transactions by 30% and make it equal to the delivery time of the goods from the seller to the buyer.

Original article: Oil trading is put on the "chain". How the blockage will help the oil industry workers.