In the past the seafood industry, to a large extent, avoided the exchange of data altogether because neither governments, nor consumers, required such data. This is rapidly changing however, and with the US Seafood Import Monitoring Program, chain of custody records will be required for seafood prior to import beginning January 1, 2018. In a global industry comprised of disconnected stakeholders this represents a problem because supply chain actors must coordinate around a single tool or standard for data capture and transfer. Thus, the Fishcoin network is not an application, but a series of APIs and SDKs designed for existing industry tools that can be utilized by third party developers who wish to integrate their applications.
Supply chain stakeholders such as fishermen and processors can receive Fishcoin Tokens in exchange for providing data, and the tokens will be the mechanism to reward them for their additional effort in capturing data. The flow of Fishcoin Tokens moves from buyers to sellers in the supply chain, which creates a virtuous cycle rewarding those who make the extra effort to capture data such as fishermen and supply chain intermediaries. This rightly shifts the economic burden to downstream actors in the supply chain such as hotels, restaurants and retailers who benefit most from traceability and other data as they can use such data to validate the quality of their seafood to consumers.