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Eximchain (EXC) is a blockchain network aimed at revolutionizing the supply chain. The platform offers promising new possibilities into how global business can be improved through the use of blockchain and smart contract technology. The Eximchain network also makes use of a unique Quadratic Voting Governance Mechanism, which has been recognized by Vitalik Buterin as a promising new way to govern decentralized networks.

We’ll explain exactly what Eximchain is along with the problems that it hopes to solve, while covering the following topics:

Eximchain is a public, permission-based blockchain hybrid attempting to offer Supply Chain Finance (SCF) solutions to developing small-and-medium enterprise (SME) buyers and suppliers.

The Eximchain project was started in 2015 at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) by a team with decades of academic and industry experience in computer science, banking, and global supply chain finance.

Eximchain’s vision is to “use blockchain technology to bring SCF into the digital era and lower financing barriers for SMEs”

The Eximchain team is comprised of an impressive group of business and tech industry veterans from China, Singapore and the US.

CEO Hope Liu

The team is headed by CEO Hope Liu, who has a B.A. from Peking University and an MBA from MIT. She handled cross-border transactions at UBS Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore for 6.5 years, and is the Lab Lead of the North America Blockchain Association.

The company’s CTO, Juan Huertas, has been a Tech Consultant for startups since he was 18, and also has B.S. in Computer Science from MIT. Other notable members include architect Jamex XU, business analyst Jia Zhang, and director of engineering Louis Lamia.

The project has also received valuable mentorship and guidance from the MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative, the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, and Plug And Play Fintech Accelerator.  

While Eximchain is still in its early stages of development, the project has already received a great deal of praise and attention. It was chosen as the Grand Champion of the 2016 Boston Seagull Entrepreneurship Contest, received the Engine of Innovation Prize of the 2016 Rice Business Plan Competition, and was a Finalist of the 2017 MIT $100K Business Plan Competition Accelerate.

Before going deeper into what Eximchain is, it’s first important to have a basic understanding of Supply Chain Finance (SCF). The Eximchain white paper defines SCF as:

“A set of technology-based business and financing processes that allow financiers to fund an organization’s operations through its supply chain relationships. SCF enables buyers to optimize working capital and suppliers to generate additional operating cash flow while simultaneously minimizing risk across the entire supply chain by enabling buyers and sellers to shrink their inventories, collect money from customers faster and delay payments to their suppliers.”

According to Eximchain, the problem in the current global market is that SMEs in developing countries face a financing gap totaling over $2 trillion. This financing gap is particularly concerning because, as cited by the World Bank, SMEs contribute up to 60% of total employment and up to 40% of GDP in developing markets.

Innovative SCF solutions therefore offer a powerful tool for SME buyers, suppliers and financiers to overcome this funding gap.

Eximchain plans to create an ecosystem which will enable SMEs to gain access to affordable capital sources by giving financiers visibility into the supply chain cash flow.

Eximchain will offer innovative solutions in SCF by using smart contract technology to form and draw out the terms of partnerships between financiers, suppliers and SMEs. This is accomplished through Eximchain’s smart contract-based ecosystem, which “allows SMEs to quickly implement customized SCF solutions or issue digital tokens on a permissioned fork of Ethereum supporting data privacy.”

At the heart of Eximchain is the Eximchain SDK—a software development kit, which developers can use to build SCF applications.

One such application that is planned to be built by the Eximchain team is called Multiparty Dynamic Contracting (MDC). MDC is designed to use game theory to automatically create contracts that will “achieve the globally optimal solution” for the buyer, the supplier and the financier.

In theory, Eximchain’s optimized contracts should form agreements that will maximize profits and efficiency for all parties involved. Better still, Eximchain will serve as a record-keeping service for all interactions and agreements made on the network. This will provide greater visibility and risk assessment information for all parties.

Last month, Eximchain announced a partnership with YOOsourcing, a sourcing platform in China with over 30k business users. Together, they plan to build POCs(Proof of Concepts) in Supply Chain Sourcing, Supply Chain Financing and Logistics Management fields in the next 12 months.

Eximchain uses a new governance and consensus model called the Quadratic Voting Governance Mechanism, which as mentioned in the introduction, is being heralded by Vitalik Buterin as a promising system with which to govern decentralized networks.

The most important feature of Quadratic Voting is that it allows nodes to include in their vote, not just whether they agree or disagree, but also how strongly they feel about their answer. Users who want to cast a more powerful vote on a subject will have the option to do so, but at the cost of staking exponentially more tokens.

This innovative voting process is expected to be a powerful tool in preventing tyranny of the majority on the Eximchain network. Tokens cast as votes are redistributed equally among nodes at the end of each governance cycle. It would therefore be a long and costly process for any group to try and take control.

A final important component of Eximchain’s Quadratic Voting Governance Mechanism is the network’s strict Know Your Customer (KYC) policies. All users will have to verify their identity before they can participate on the Eximchain network.

The Eximchain network consists of three key members: Maker Nodes, Validator Nodes and other network participants.

Maker Nodes are responsible for proposing blocks, and will also be tasked with voting in a new Maker Node every governance cycle. Nodes can opt to become Maker Nodes if they are approved and voted in by an agreed threshold of existing Maker Nodes according to the Quadratic Voting Governance Mechanism. The addresses of Maker Nodes are registered in a BlockVoting contract to ensure accountability.

Validator Nodes, by contrast, help secure the network by voting on blocks proposed by the Maker Nodes. Validator Nodes are the final step in deciding which blocks are added to the official blockchain. Like Maker Nodes, Validator Nodes are also required to register in the BlockVoting contract.

All nodes (including Maker Nodes, Validator Nodes, and other network participants) are required to register to vote in order to participate in the network governance mechanism. Registered Voter Nodes will have the responsibility of voting out a Maker Node every governance cycle. Voter Nodes will also be eligible to become Maker Nodes once the network is established.

When it comes to the identities of participants in the Quadratic Voting Governance Mechanism, the Eximchain white paper states:

“. . .it is important to keep in mind the real world identities behind these nodes will largely represent corporate incentives in the global supply chain and development communities. Ultimately, we believe the incentives of these stakeholders must be aligned at the protocol level. It follows that developers have a vested interest and duty to secure the infrastructure their applications, clients and corporates rely on. Similarly, clients and end-users have a vested interest in ensuring honest development that improves the ecosystem, as well as a vested interest in punishing freeloaders on the network. The latter reflects our view that Maker Nodes should represent developer pools, motivating clients and end-users to become Registered Voter Nodes to participate in governance.”

Eximchain uses Eximcoins (EXC) to pay network fees, validate state changes, execute governance decisions, and access applications built on the Eximchain network. EXC Tokens are ERC-20 compatible tokens distributed on the Ethereum blockchain.

There will be a total of 150,000,000 EXC tokens released, 60,000,000 of which were sold during Eximchain’s first round of fundraising. The rest of the tokens have been allocated to bonus accounts and reserves. An additional 75,000,000 EXC will be released and distributed when the mainnet launches later this year.   

Eximchain is currently in the stage of sourcing large scale network testing for the upcoming mainnet launch. The current testnet has hundreds of nodes running the protocol on real, not simulated, infrastructure live across 14 regions. The protocol is automated and managed through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and will give users the ability to manage a globally distributed blockchain, API, and key management infrastructures to support user applications.

Over the next few months there will be a launch of several additional testnets with onboard SMEs to execute smart contract-based solutions using a preliminary version of Eximchain’s SDK smart contract layer.

This will be followed by the release of a 2.0 version of the platform by the end of the year. The 2.0 release will enable participants in the global supply chain to launch their own supply chain management tools using the Eximchain SDK.

Eximchain’s first round of financing ended in February, 2018, but Eximchain’s ERC-20 tokens are currently being traded on IDEX and some small exchanges such as UEX.

Once the mainnet is launched by Q3 this year, the native tokens will be made available to purchase once the token swap process has been completed.

As ERC-20 tokens, EXC tokens can be stored on most Ethereum wallets including MyEtherWallet, Mist, MetaMask and Parity.

While Eximchain is still in its infancy, the success of this company would bring with it a lot of upside for investors, users, and the greater economy.

Eximchain offers better visibility for SMEs and financiers which could allow for greater trade efficiency in global markets, while at the same time mitigating risks for all parties involved. It creates new investment opportunities for private investors into SCF, which in the past have been monopolized by banks. Often times these banks have carried all of the negotiating power in lending to small SMEs, leading to one-sided partnerships. The smart contract technology employed by Eximchain not only creates greater opportunity for financiers and SMEs, but it also ensures fairly structured contracts using game theory mathematics.

Eximchain’s smart contracts are designed not only to be fair, but also efficient. Applications like the MDC could save countless hours that would have been wasted drawing out rejected contracts and paperwork. Finally, Eximchain’s historical record of deals made between financiers and SME’s could be valuable in assessing risk factors for future deals. Their Quadratic Voting-based governance mechanism is a new way to distribute wealth across voting participants while still maintaining network security.

Eximchain has yet to break the top 200 cryptocurrencies currently on the market, perhaps in part because it doesn’t market itself with the same sort of sexy grandiosity as other blockchain platforms. Yet, what Eximchain offers can truly provide tremendous opportunity for economic growth for small businesses and private investors. For advocates of the life improving possibilities of blockchain technology for the common person, Eximchain is a platform worth keeping an eye on.

The post What is Eximchain? | The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide appeared first on UNHASHED.

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