VeriTX chooses Algorand for aerospace digital supply chain

VeriTX is a digital marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of aircraft parts that can be 3D printed on-demand at the point of use. With all branches of the US military adopting a digital supply chain strategy the value of the market for digital aircraft parts is expected to hit $3.1 billion by 2025. By integrating its supply chain with the Algorand blockchain, VeriTX says it will be able to track parts from order to delivery on an immutable distributed ledger. This will enable parties to any transaction to verify the origin and authenticity of the part – mitigating the $3-billion problem of counterfeit parts as well as reducing cost and waste, and improving aircraft uptime.

Until now, aerospace manufacturing has largely relied on business systems developed in the 1980s — ordering parts from printed catalogs via fax & phone. Using this process the delay between ordering and receiving parts has stretched from weeks to months. With a fully digitized supply chain, the time between order and delivery can be a matter of hours – especially if an aircraft maintenance facility has a 3D printer on-site.

During a recent commercial airline flight from New Zealand to Los Angeles, for example, a cabin part failed that would have put a business class seat out of action. Using VeriTX, the airline was able to order a digital replacement while still on route and have a part manufactured in an hour. When the plane arrived in Los Angeles the 3D printed part was fitted in time for its return flight – avoiding the loss of not being able to sell the business class seat. VeriTX CEO James Allen Regenor says aerospace is the first vertical industry to deploy the VeriTX platform, and that medical and industrial markets will follow.

For Algorand, the news follows its recent announcement that it had partnered with London-based securities exchange Archax to "work on new innovative smart financial products."

Archax has recently become the the first company to receive authorization from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority to operate as a digital securities exchange and Virtual Asset Service Provider. Anchax CEO Graham Rodford says the exchange plans to deliver smart stablecoins and liquid alternative instruments, as well as products which will disrupt the lending, borrowing and staking space.

The Algorand Foundation’s vision is of a borderless, frictionless economy that supports the next generation of financial products. In partnership with Algorand Inc, the foundation has built the Algorand proof-of-stake blockchain protocol — which was designed by Turing Award-winning cryptographer Silvio Micali. The Alogrand coin is the ALGO. Launched in June 2019, the current ALGO price is US$0.30 and the token is up 43% since January 1st, 2020. A relatively ‘new’ blockchain, Algorand differs from older blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum in that it was built from the outset to drive complex applications requiring speed, scalability, finality, and security – while at the same time being cost-effective (top of mind for many developers at the moment given Ethereum’s high gas charges).

Algorand upgrade

Back in August the foundation and Algorand Inc said it was upgrading the blockchain and launching “comprehensive smart contract capabilities that will enable the creation of DeFi solutions and dApps that can scale to billions of users, tens of millions of daily transactions, with negligible transaction fees.” The foundation said that integrating this enhanced smart contract functionality into its layer-1 protocol with existing capabilities such as Atomic Transfers, stateless smart contracts, and Algorand Standard Assets will remove restrictions around scale, transaction speeds and high transaction fees (the typical Alogrand transaction fee is .001 ALGO) that have long been barriers to mainstream blockchain adoption.

Algorand’s focus in the upgrade appeared to be the booming DeFi sector, saying the enhancements will enable DeFi and Algorand dApp developers to build more sophisticated and massively scalable applications. "DeFi gives the world access to an essentially unlimited number of financial products and services,” says Micali “It’s important for the new generation of dApps not to be stalled by the shortcomings of the first-generation blockchains,” He adds that the performance of the upgraded blockchain will rival today’s existing financial services solutions as the blockchain industry matures to take on established financial systems.

With just over a year having passed since its mainnet launch, the Algorand potential appears evident to a range of industries – with nearly 400 companies now leveraging the platform to build applications – in sectors such as: investing (Republic), asset tokenization (Props), stablecoins (Tether, USDC, MELD Gold), CBDCs (Marshall Islands), gaming (World Chess), insurance (Attestiv) and accounting (Verady).