Blockchain & Data Clean Rooms

GSBN has dedicated itself to enabling the sharing of trusted shipping data to drive the digitisation of the industry and create value for all participants in the ecosystem. The GSBN platform is built upon blockchain technology and there is a strict access policy to govern the visibility of information by role. The policy as designed strictly follows a need-to-know basis. However certain scenarios require more complex data-sharing processes than from a single data contributor. For instance, the current platform does not allow for aggregating data across many carriers or terminals.

To solve this problem, GSBN has chosen to partner with Decentriq to bring best-in-class data privacy technology to its blockchain consortium and to continue developing the most disruptive and innovative solution for the global trade economy.

Decentriq data clean rooms have been designed to address this very problem and are found exceptionally complementary to the blockchain. In short, the Decentriq data clean room leverages a novel technology called confidential computing, providing a trusted execution environment at the hardware level, which no one has access to.

While the GSBN Blockchain platform provides a tamper-proof record of the hashes of the encrypted data being submitted in the clean room, Decentriq is able to guarantee secure and confidential processing of sensitive data even when it’s off-chain. In addition, the Decentriq platform allows for granular settings in the input, output, and permission. This effectively introduces another layer of access control policy, which can be configured based on both roles and scenarios. The settings are viewable by all data contributors before submitting data to the clean room and agreed upon by all participants before the data clean room is published. Once it's published, the settings cannot be changed without the data contributor's approval and all actions are logged so usage is restricted and monitored.

By combining blockchain and Decentriq data clean room, GSBN can guarantee not only data integrity but also privacy, security and auditability during the whole data lifecycle: at rest, in transit, and in use whether on-chain or off-chain.

GSBN is currently developing use cases with Decentriq such as the sharing of shipping activity insights from multiple shipping lines with financial institutions. By combining data clean rooms with the GSBN blockchain network, shipping lines can safely and effortlessly share their data insights without fear of disclosing the underlying sensitive details, and financial institutions would get the key insights that they need without having to devote extra resources to plow through the vast amount of data from heterogeneous data vendors.

Traditionally, any sharing of insights requires a tradeoff between privacy, convenience, and efficiency. Now, by combining the two technologies, GSBN and Decentriq are able to provide new insights without adding effort or time to both ends of the sharing while preserving maximum confidentiality. By marrying blockchain technology with confidential computing, we look forward to empowering financial institutions in their KYC and facility set up processes with aggregated insights derived from various carriers on our platform. Many large industry players have joined or are expected to join the consortium, stay tuned for future announcements.

“Collaboration with Decentriq allows us to cover a wider range of data-sharing scenarios and extend the use cases for our ecosystems beyond blockchain. We believe the next generation of blockchain consortiums will combine blockchain technology with other emerging technologies, such as confidential computing, enabling the aggregation of data from different sources and converting them into valuable insights while keeping them safe and secure.” – Edmund To, CTO of GSBN

“Confidential Computing (CC) is emerging as an inevitable technology to protect data in active use. While CC solves many problems around data integrity and data confidentiality in a very elegant and scalable way, it lacks some strong security guarantees on data immutability and ordering. Blockchain is the perfect fit to fill those shortcomings. It is great to see those technologies getting fully integrated into a turn-key solution for revolutionising the global trade industry.” – Stefan Deml, CTO at Decentriq

About GSBN Incorporated in Hong Kong, the Global Shipping Business Network (GSBN) is an independent, not-for-profit technology consortium building a blockchain-enabled operating system to redefine global trade. The platform facilitates trusted collaboration between disparate and competing market participants, as well as enabling greater efficiencies and resilience. It also aims to expand the global trade ecosystem by creating bridges to new market participants including banks, fintech companies, and other consortia, while supporting the development of technology-driven innovation as the sector makes the leap to digital. The consortium was first founded by 8 global leaders in the global shipping industry accounting for one in every three containers handled in the world. www.gsbn.trade

About Decentriq Decentriq is an enterprise SaaS platform providing data clean rooms - allowing users to leverage data previously not possible. Easily and securely collaborate with external stakeholders to derive new data value - all with guaranteed trust and privacy because of Decentriq's underlying encryption-in-use technology called confidential computing. Decentriq is deployed in multiple industries including media (Goldbach), healthcare (Roche), and the public sector (Swiss Army).

Press Contacts
Edelman for GSBN
June Wong
+852 2837 4786
gsbnglobal@edelman.com

Decentriq
press@decentriq.com