This morning at 10:00 JST, STANDAGE and DCP Co., Ltd. announced that they have begun a joint study of a trade platform with payment built in, with The Shoko Chukin Bank taking part. The target is commercial launch in fiscal year 2028, the year Japan’s electronic bill of lading law is expected to take effect. The idea fits in one line: settle an electronic bill of lading (eBL) and a payment in DCJPY, the tokenised deposit issued by The Shoko Chukin Bank, as one simultaneous transaction (the joint release; The Shoko Chukin Bank’s release, in Japanese). CargoX, whose eBL platform STANDAGE uses, is announcing its part in Europe on the same day.
The timing is not a coincidence of the calendar. Five days earlier, on 23 October, Japan’s Cabinet approved the bill that amends the Commercial Code so that a bill of lading can exist as an “electronic bill of lading record”, with rights to the cargo that can be held and transferred like paper (NHK, 23 October). The document is about to become legally digital. This week, a bank stepped in to make sure the money does not stay behind.
Everyone has met this stand-off.
Anyone who has sold something to a stranger online knows it. The buyer will not pay until the parcel ships; the seller will not ship until the money lands. Neither is being unreasonable. Each is protecting themselves from someone they have never met and cannot easily chase. Marketplaces solved it with escrow: a third party holds the money, and the money and the goods change hands on the same signal.
International trade is the same stand-off with more zeros and a border in the middle. The exporter ships and hopes to be paid. The importer pays and hopes the documents arrive before the cargo does. Whoever goes first carries the risk for the days in between. When the gap feels too wide, trade simply does not happen: the Asian Development Bank puts the global trade finance gap at $2.5 trillion, about 10% of global trade (January 2026), and smaller firms carry most of it.
Trade’s old fix was a bank going first.
For a century the answer has been to put banks in the middle and move paper between them: letters of credit, documentary collections, a bill of lading couriered from one counter to another. It works, but it is slow and expensive, and it leaves a gap the documents cannot close. Ships got faster; paper did not. The Nikkei’s report on the bill names the problem plainly: original documents arrive after the vessel, and importers cannot take delivery.
The eBL fixes the courier. On 4 June 2026, DCSA announced that five eBL platforms, CargoX among them, can now exchange eBLs with one another under a common legal annex approved by the International Group of P&I Clubs. But a faster document is still one half of the trade. As the release puts it, true efficiency cannot be realised “as long as the final financial flows remain disconnected” from the documents.
The milestone: the check becomes the trigger.
What the three parties propose is the escrow logic, applied to physical trade and run by a bank. The seller’s eBL sits in a digital vault inside Digitrad Payments. The buyer can request payment online at any hour, in step with the container rather than with branch opening times. After the bank’s standard checks, a smart contract links the payment in DCJPY with the transfer of the eBL, so title moves only when the money does. Because DCJPY is a deposit at a licensed bank, companies can use it, in the release’s words, “just as they would a regular deposit account”.
The part worth noticing is what the design keeps. It does not remove the bank’s judgement; it makes that judgement the trigger. The bank’s verification stops being a step that happens somewhere along a paper trail and becomes the condition on which document and money move together. That is why this is a milestone, not a demo: a bank has joined a design in which its own checks are wired directly into settlement, and which other financial institutions are meant to be able to join on the same platform.
The honest open edge is also in the release. This is a joint study, with pilot tests still being prepared. The eBL bill has been approved by the Cabinet, not yet passed by the Diet. And “both at once” is easiest when both sides sit on the same rails; reaching counterparties abroad depends on connecting to cross-border payment networks, which the release describes as the next stage, not this one. The first phase proves the mechanism. Scale is a later question, and an honest one.
This is the layer we are building
Our part is the vault and the trade around it. In Digitrad Payments, the eBL and the payment are exchanged in one step, and each step leaves a record of who, when and how much, which is also what a bank needs to screen the trade without opening an envelope. CargoX carries the document, DCP carries the money, The Shoko Chukin Bank issues the deposit and performs the checks, and we join the two so that neither side has to go first.
And we are building it as infrastructure, not as a single product. The design is meant to let other financial institutions issue tokenised deposits on DCP and connect to Digitrad Payments, and, later, to reach cross-border payment networks, so that a bank or a partner can offer this to its own customers without building it from scratch.
We are grateful to The Shoko Chukin Bank and DCP for taking this step in public, and to CargoX for building the document rail it runs on. The goal for 2028 is simple to state: a small Japanese company trading with a stranger should be able to stop asking who goes first.
The litmus test
Take your last shipment and write down two times: when the documents were released to the buyer, and when the money was released to the seller. Count the hours between them, and name who was exposed during those hours.
If the answer is “nobody, because they happened together”, you already have what this study is building. If the answer is “us, for nine days”, you are paying the price of going first. For those who run documentary collections or letters of credit day to day: at which step does your bank’s check actually happen, before the cargo arrives or after? We would love to compare notes.
The announcements
- Joint release by STANDAGE and DCP (English)
- Joint release by STANDAGE and DCP (Japanese)
- The Shoko Chukin Bank’s release (Japanese, PDF)
- The joint release on STANDAGE’s site (Japanese)
