Is CargoX the real deal or is the idea lost at sea?

The ICO craze is in full swing. To get an idea of how "in over our heads" the majority of us are, take a look at this gif visualizing the antagonistic amount of recent ICO's. I mean, seriously... How are you supposed to know what's worth investing in and whats vaporware?

How many of you saw your favorite coin in this ocean of opportunity?
Let's talk about CargoX

From what I can tell, many people use a companies Telegram, Twitter and Reddit to research them. While good for sentiment, these places tend to be echo chambers.
You can dig through Github repositories looking for commits and recent activity. You can sift amongst the pages of Bitcointalk.org to dig up more focused discussions. LinkedIn, Crunchbase are good for digging deeper into the people behind the project.
These links all go to CargoX pages for those who wish to join in the research.
With that said, let's get right into this.
Who can guess what % of your goods come across the sea?

Ninety percent... yes, NINETY PERCENT of the items we use are linked to the Ocean Shipping industry. All of these items are tracked using what's called a bill of lading or B/L for short. CargoX intends to turn the B/L system into a blockchain for the ocean cargo shipping industry. Considering one ship can hold over 10,000 cargo containers, we definitely could use a scaled up solution for the tracking of this cargo.

What is CargoX? At the time of this writing, it is ranked 1230 on CoinMarketCap with a circulating supply of approximately 100M. It is currently trading at $0.11 and opened trading on January 31st. Their ICO was a quick one, raising 7 Million in under 8 hours.

In simple terms CargoX plans to build a blockchain bill of lading for the shipping industry. Typically the Bill of Lading or B/L was always done by hand and on paper. In the past decades, as tech grew, centralized computers could run these operations more effectively than operators doing it by hand. But with NINETY percent of the worlds goods involved, shouldn't we have a decentralized repository for this? With some ships now holding up to 18,000 containers, there is definitely a problem being solved and a business use/application for something like this. Can it be done though?

I will start with this...

Nothing on Github... nada, zip, except for their token sale contracts. While normally this might seem like a red flag, the company stated that they are developing the software internally. Their head Blockchain Developer does not have any mention of CargoX on his LinkedIn. Why not take credit for the work if you believe in it? The development of this will have to be watched closely and to me feels like a big indicator to success early on. Investors will want to keep an itchy trigger finger on this until the mainnet is released. The CargoX team would be very wise to keep the public informed of the development progress. The longer this part of the project the dark, the sketchier it feels.

Speaking of the team, the company 45HC has a strong presence on LinkedIn as shown by this list compiled by ICOChecker on Github.
If you're watching, thank you icochecker for your efforts.

The company that appears to be behind the CargoX project, www.45HC.com is a "cargo containers as a service" company if you will. You can use them to order partial or whole containers to ship your goods. They have been around a few years and appear to have secured two separate rounds of recent angel investor funds, most likely for this CargoX project. The investors themselves appear to be legitimate and you can find more about this on the Crunchbase page.

Which leads me to finish with their roadmap.

Roadmap:

In Q1 2018 we will introduce the first crypto cargo payment option, and release the Bill of Lading exchange protocol, to announce the first beta trial Smart B/L sea-freight shipment!
In Q2 2018 the Smart B/L eXchange dApp will be released, and we have already signed a TOP 5 non-vessel operating common carrier-NVOCC (Fancy words for "Container Shipping Company") for the test trial — a cargo shipment will travel from Asia to Europe with the hot new technology used for document transfer and clearance.
In Q2-Q4 2018 a lot of marketing activities will be happening, as we will be on-boarding our first customers, importers and exporters. Then we will continue with development of add-on features.

Ultimately, this could be a fancy tracking app for containers, or it could revolutionize the way people manage their shipments. It's up to the team to make it happen.

One last note and I do take this into my investment plan... The shipping yard, it is a strange place. It is definitely an "Old Boys Club" and a very nepotistic, almost inherited livelyhood. I do wonder how the CargoX people plan on breaking their 4th plane. Taken from a list of 10 strange facts about shipping and cargo ships.

9. Shipping companies don't like outsiders.
Shipping companies are so secretive and private that, for example, the official Greek shipowners' association refuses to reveal how many members it actually has, and that's not considered weird in the industry.

Wouldn't that be the craziest piece of this whole ICO puzzle here would be for something like that to take it down? How do you complete your due diligence on something like that!?!

Attention
This is not investment advice. I'm jsut a guy on the internet who searched a few things, read a few things and took some time to type it up all nice for you but do not let that stop you from DYOR!

Happy HODLing
Full disclosure I am buying about 10,000 CXO... but only after I write this post.

Added this link to the post as well as another graphic detailing their plan.
I agree that it is a risky project, from a few standpoints. The lack of code visibility is a red flag. We definitely cannot discount companies desiring to keep proprietary secrets to their development close to the chest. IP is hard to protect nowadays. That said, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of proprietary coding needed for a project like this. Success ultimately lies in application and adoption.
The next 5 months are very important for investors watching this project.

Q1 2018
Release of B/L eXchange protocol
We will be releasing our B/L eXchange protocol and announcing the first beta trial Smart B/L sea-freight shipment.

Q2 2018
Smart B/L dApp
Release of Smart B/L eXchange dApp. We have already signed an NVOCC (non-vessel operating common carrier - one of top 10 in the world) for the test trial. The Smart B/L will be issued in Asia for a container shipment from Asia to Europe.

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smcaterpillar (52) · 7 years ago

Nice ICO overview, thanks!

"Nothing on Github... nada, zip, except for their token sale contracts."
This is seriously a very red flag for me. Proper software development is incredibly hard. I mean writing production ready stable software, not copy and pasting some notebooks or ERC20 tokens together. This gets several orders of magnitude harder if you do stuff on a blockchain.

So if they have nothing to show for that they are capable of doing this properly in terms of an open source project where you can inspect their code, this becomes a very high risk investment.

$0.00

1 vote

caltdinvestor (39) · 7 years ago (edited)

weirdgod (28) · 7 years ago (edited)

Development is done internally for a reason. The reason is that at this stage anyone could easily copy/paste our work. Once we have stronger ecosystem/partner/customer list - we will begin opening the code to the public. Before deployment, all smart contract code will be vetted by experts (here is where MakerDAO partnership comes in) ... But - follow us - we are releasing news and more info about product as we progress...

weirdgod (28) · 7 years ago

Main blockchain developer now has CargoX as a main occupation at linkedin :)

caltdinvestor (39) · 7 years ago

Thanks for the update! I have recently done more looking into this. The risk potential has increased as IBM and Maersk are working on a similar protocol. Bought some shares in IBM this morning just in case. ;)

Shipping/NVOCC business is very fragmented. The BIGGEST player on the market has 2% market share. Now... Maersk+IBM are developing something... But do you really think Maersk's competitors will want to use the solution they have no decision making powers in? Sounds very risky... There is where CargoX as a neutral player comes in!