dexFreight, Centrifuge, and the Maker Foundation have tokenized freight invoices to use them as collateral for accessing liquidity and filling short term financing gaps for trucking companies. The pilot, conducted on top of dexFreight’s network platform, connects logistics collateral to the lower cost liquidity available in Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a new financial ecosystem based on decentralized networks and open-source software.
The 8 trillion-dollar global logistics industry is cash flow intensive and requires expensive and illiquid assets such as trucks, trailers, warehouses, etc. Very often carriers must finance the transportation of loads to cover, fuel, maintenance, and driver expenses like food and shelter. Trucking companies, however, don’t receive payment until long after shipment is delivered – on average 37 days in the US market.
For an industry in which 97% of trucking companies own 20 trucks or fewer, this lack of access to capital represents a problem. Trucking companies must sell invoices to factoring companies, who charge on average 3% of the total invoice value.
