The OEL Foundation is an interesting blockchain-related project that is quite different from the other token sales that you may have seen. For one, it is a not-for-profit organization. Its stated goal is to provide “governance and resources for the development of the Open Enterprise Logistics blockchain ecosystem”. If you’ve ever encountered anything related to enterprise logistics, you’ll know that blockchain or not, the industry could do better than paper receipts and really everything paper. The OEL Foundation wants to take that apart and provide the latest and greatest technology to this sector.
Transaction Validation and Transparency
Of course, a natural question to ask is, why does the blockchain fit as a good technology in this case instead of other tech solutions? The enterprise logistics industry and its needs are in fact well suited for a blockchain solution. Why is that? One, the blockchain provides immediate transparency to the whole system. This is not something you usually need day to day but when things go wrong, this is a big boon and can save you man-days worth of work tracking down all the parts of the puzzle.
Then, there is the idea of validation. Once validation is put on the blockchain, you are out of the ‘he-said-she-said’ world and into a world where you can prove your claims. This also opens up huge areas of commerce while in-transit, such as lending against invoices for example. Banks generally are hesitant to do this, because of the perceived risk of fraud. However, with a blockchain solution that includes banks as the participants of the network, their risk is vastly diminished and can open up new areas of commerce altogether.
OEL Foundation and its Goals
The OEL Foundation and its goals are multi-proged. To build such an ambitious system requires many different parties in the enterprise logistics industry to come together and sit down at one table. To this end, the OEL Foundation will need to bring all the supply chain participants to one common standard. Arguably, this is going to be the toughest battle for the foundation, since in many such attempts, building the technology is the easier part and setting standards that everyone adopts is the harder part. Therefore, the foundation will have its work cut out from day one.
Then, there is the problem of actually designing, architecting, and building the technology stack that can be used by the industry participants. This includes the blockchain part of the equation, but should contain other ancillary services as well, such as documents, storing document hashes, etc. As we said before, this is usually the easier part, but still something that needs to be done and the OEL foundation has taken it upon themselves to build it out.
Finally there is the OPN token that is used as the native token that is used to ‘power’ the smart contracts that are run inside the blockchain system.
If you want to learn more, check out the OEL Foundation website and whitepaper. There is a token sale ongoing for the OPN token. Remember that token sales are extremely risky and you can lose all your money. Never invest more than you can afford to lose completely.
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