It’s not news that blockchain technology is transforming the world, making its presence felt across industries—including travel, health, and retail, among others. Acknowledging the many benefits that blockchain brings to the table, Indian government-owned oil marketing company Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) has announced a joint venture with Zupple Labs.
Manual verification of purchase orders is a thing of the past
The collaboration will see Hindustan Petroleum incorporating a blockchain-based digital credentiality technology, developed by Zupple Labs, into its purchase order system. This will allow HPCL to automatically verify purchase orders (POs).
Zupple Labs, headquartered in Karnataka, India, describes itself as a new-age company that specializes in blockchain, decentralized systems, and cloud computing. The company has repeatedly developed a verification tech dubbed “LegitDoc” that will allow HPCL to issue digital POs to its vendors. This will effectively eliminate the need for manual verifications.
How will the move benefit third-party verifiers?
Moreover, third-party verifiers can directly verify the validity of POs automatically on the HPCL website using the blockchain system. An HPCL spokesperson said, “The implementation helps to automate the verification of HPCL POs to external parties. This works by integrating the blockchain system with HPCL’s internal e-PO and generates tamper-evident verifiable POs.”
“These POs will be dispatched to vendors, which in turn can be shared with third parties. Any third-party verifier can directly verify these POs on the HPCL vendor portal verification application,” the person mentioned above said.
Neil Martis, the co-founder of Zupple Labs, noted that the PO verification system operates on “two parallel blockchains” — the public Near blockchain and the private Hyperledger Fabric blockchain — which serve as settlement layers. Hindustan Petroleum sees the latter as a vital part of its Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery strategy. HPCL has already issued 3,000 POs using the LegitDoc system thus far.
Crypto is only a subset of blockchain technology
We see the stories every day. Hong Kong residents grow weary of digital assets in the aftermath of the JPEX crypto scandal. The US securities regulator cracks down on the non-fungible token (NFT) sector. Hackers have stolen over $3.45 billion from crypto exchanges since 2012.
Given such headlines, it’s only natural that one gets jittery about cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency trading. And then there’s the harsh truth about Bitcoin mining contributing to global warming. This may further push one on edge.
However, what skeptics get wrong about distributed ledger technology is that cryptocurrencies are but a small subset of it. And therefore, one must think twice before dismissing the vast potential blockchain offers society as a whole.