Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance, a property/casualty insurance subsidiary of Tokio Marine Holdings, and NTT DATA Corporation, a leading business and IT services provider, have successfully tested the first blockchain-based insurance policy for marine cargo insurance certificates, IBTimes UK reported.

The insurance policies and other shipping documents were forwarded by and shared among parties concerned with a trade. According to Tokio Marine, the proof of concept created a "data" bill of lading, letter of credit and a commercial invoice on a blockchain. The system was tested from the perspective of a shipper that requires a certificate of insurance to fulfil the insurance requirement on the letter of credit. For creating a certificate of insurance, the system imported the necessary data from the "data" bill of lading, letter of credit and a commercial invoice.

Tokio Marine further stated that the blockchain-based system significantly reduced the data inputting work load of the shipper as compared to the existing web-based insurance certificate issuing system.

"It was actually proven that the blockchain based system will cut 85% of the shipper's time of data inputting work in order to receive an insurance certificate. It was also tested in terms of accessibility from the parties concerned, such as consignee and banks," it added.

In addition, the test also involved "a malicious revision to the blockchain data" to examine how the system could deal with attacks, which performed successfully.

"When one block was attacked and rewritten, the tampered block was not distributed to other nodes and it became obvious that there was inconsistency compared to the other nodes. It also showed that the whole blockchain system still worked with the legitimate data even though one node was attacked," Tokio Marine explained.

According to IBTimes UK, NTT DATA Corp is currently involved in setting up an international blockchain trade consortium with shipping companies, freight forwarders, banks and insurers.