The Timberblock Project

 

The Timberblock project is a proposed platform for the processing, trading and recording of timber movements from forest to consumer. Combining environmental verification with increased efficiency in every stage of the chain of custody.
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• Digital ledger technology, or blockchain drastically reduces the paperwork and irregularities which are such a big part of shipping and supply chain of timber.  Large amounts of often paper based documents accompany transactions. These documents pass through a many organisations for the carriage, delivery and payments to be made, processes that are long and time-consuming.​

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• The proposed blockchain technology behind this project is simply an anonymised distributed ledger database with permissioned access. It has the power to radically overhaul the chains of custody and revolutionise the shipping of goods into a paperless, online environment. This would liberate all parties in each transaction using public and private keys to execute physical transactions, and allow the storing of sensitive information in an encrypted form

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• The quality of the data in the timberblock system is backed up by a unique species and origin verification using isotropic analysis and chemical marking of timber samples (unlike existing chain of custody which are largely voluntary and rely on the honesty of a number of parties along the chain).