dexFreight, providers of a blockchain-based logistics platform, today announced it has completed a pilot project to tokenize freight invoices and use them as collateral to provide invoice factoring at a much lower borrowing rate for trucking companies. The pilot with Centrifuge and the Maker Foundation used decentralized finance (DeFi), an emerging use case in the public blockchain, on top of dexFreight’s logistics platform with several participating freight brokers and trucking companies.

“We can now reduce friction, extend instant credit lines, and offer highly competitive rates to trucking companies on the dexFreight platform,” said Jim Handoush dexFreight’s newly appointed president and CEO who brings more than 30 years of transportation, technology and logistics experience to dexFreight. “This is a major step in the transformation of the logistics industry, and we could not have realized such a milestone without our partners Centrifuge and the Maker Foundation.”
The pilot proved that smart contracts and tokenized invoices can be used to create a faster and inexpensive alternative to traditional factoring. For an industry with millions of small trucking companies around the world, this access to lower and faster capital represents a major shift in solving a liquidity problem. Trucking companies often seek short term financing against invoices to cover, fuel, maintenance, and driver expenses because they do not receive payment until long after the shipment is delivered – on average 37 days in the US and even longer in Europe.
In the pilot, a third-party logistics (3PL) provider agreed to pay on 45-day terms a carrier who opted to finance shipment invoices using the dexFreight platform’s ‘dexFi’ feature. From the moment, the trucking company pressed the dexFi button, it took less than a minute for it to receive the funds at less than a 1% borrowing rate with little or no paperwork involved.