The Silicon Review ^Asia

Royal Dutch Shell, after backing up a blockchain-based trading platform last year has gone a step further into what is now possibly considered the hottest tech news, picking up a minority stake in a distributed ledger startup, Applied Blockchain.

Applied Blockchain, a startup based in U.K has been around for three years now, and its existing clients include companies from the banking, telecoms, car-making, manufacturing and aerospace industries. This is the Applied Blockchain’s entry into the energy sector. The size of the deal was not disclosed.

Adi Ben-Ari, Applied Blockchain’s co-founder and CEO, told the media that investments and collaborations as such will accelerate the company’s growth and enable the company to deploy solutions to a truly global business ecosystem.

 Blockchain is slowly making its way into oil and gas. Forbes has also highlighted Royal Dutch Shell’s other blockchain activities which includes its joining of a blockchain consortium with other industry giants like BP and Statoil. Together with some large commodity trading companies, the oil moguls are collaborating on a blockchain platform to facilitate commodities trading for the energy market, and plan to roll out the tool by the end of the year.

The platform, which is financially backed by Dutch ABN Amro, ING, and French Societe Generale, should be launched by the end of this year.

In January 2017, Mercuria, the Swizz based commodity company, in partnership with ING and Societe Generale, announced its plan to trade oil using blockchain technology for the first time. The trade involved Mercuria shareholder ChemChina, to which the African crude oil shipment was to be made. When Marco Dunnand, CEO of Mercuria, had announced the test at the Davos World Economic Forum, he said, “The energy industry will have to digitalize more and more in oil production, refining, and shipping. So traders will also have to participate.”