Business scenario and use case
The letter of credit is but one facet of a complex process that parties engaging in international trade must go through. The export of goods across international boundaries involves many entities playing different roles and possessing different, sometimes mutually contradictory, interests. Traditionally, this process has relied on a lot of documentation that has to be physically transferred between entities. This can be quite inefficient, time-consuming, costly, and prone to manipulation by vested interests. But these are exactly the kinds of real-world problems that blockchains were designed to mitigate. Therefore, we have selected an element of an import-export scenario with simplified versions of transactions carried out in the real world as our canonical use case for practical exercises in the next few chapters.
Overview
The scenario we will describe involves a simple transaction: the sale of goods from one party to another. This...
