Newly established startup Shipcoin has launched a bitcoin-based shipping label system powered by Shippo’s shipping API to allow its users to ship products through the United States Postal Service.
Bitcoin-powered delivery
On the Shipcoin.io platform, users can simply enter basic shipping details including address, city, ZIP, senders details and recipient details to begin the process. After entering the dimensions and the weight of the package, the platform automatically generates a price and leads the users to a bitcoin payout page:
The service may prove especially useful to the many bitcoin enthusiasts who are eagerly anticipating the launch of Openbazaar, a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace. Now they will be able to use Shipcoin to deliver purchased goods throughout the United States using bitcoin.
What’s more is that Shipcoin and other similar services like Shipnik and Viabox, which accept bitcoin as their main medium of payment, have the potential to close the bitcoin-commerce loop, allowing merchants to sell products in exchange for bitcoin and then using some of it to directly pay for subsequent delivery to the customer.
It can also reduce bitcoin selling pressure from merchants across the board, particularly for a decentralized marketplace such as Openbazaar allowing both customers and businesses to avoid fiat entirely, eliminating any intermediaries and reducing cost.
Decentralized shipping?
Last year, Open Bazaar developer Brian Hoffman told Cointelegraph when asked what he'd like to see decentralized next:
“I'd like to see innovation is shipping and physical delivery. If you can start to innovate here then there's a whole new wealth of opportunities for peer-to-peer trade. It gets really exciting to think about we can continue to decentralize all these huge, monolithic business models.”
Considering recent innovations in drone technology, online services like Shipcoin are starting to look like the first steps towards this vision of decentralized shipping.