The Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee (COAC), an advisory committee to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has revealed its plans to explore blockchain technology, CoinDesk reported.

An emerging technologies working group under the COAC Global Supply Chain Subcommittee aims to monitor and advise the COAC and Customs and Border Protection on issues related to new technologies or advancement of existing technology which will have an impact on trade.

According to a summary report: “The working group initially will be looking into the applicability of blockchain to the trade processing.”

Following conference calls and a two day workshop, the group came up with 14 proposed use cases, including capturing and keeping track of partnering government agencies licenses, permits, certificate of origin reporting and free trade agreement product qualifications, carnets and bonded movement tracking.

“The group is now looking into these cases and determining through workflow processes to determine how this would be deployed with blockchain technology,” it said.