Beyond the Bill of Lading: Building Trust in Digital Customs Documentation

Article: An AI-driven Digital Customs Documentation System built on Hedera’s distributed ledger technology that enhances speed, security, and transparency for cross border trade, leveraging Teleport’s cross border eCommerce logistics expertise.

Much of the conversation around trade digitalisation focuses on electronic transferable records such as the electronic Bill of Lading, but a substantial share of the paperwork underpinning cross-border trade transfers no title at all. Customs documentation needs to be trusted, verifiable and interoperable across organisations and jurisdictions.

A proof of concept now running in Malaysia is testing what happens when that category of document becomes independently verifiable at scale. The initiative demonstrates how the TradeTrust framework could be applied beyond transferable records, where the requirement is not transfer of title but independent verification across systems and borders.

Teleport, Capital A’s logistics venture and Southeast Asia’s largest air logistics network, partnered with The Hashgraph Group in April 2026 to co-develop a Digital Customs Documentation System (DCDS). In a recent interview with Genfinity, Teleport’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, Milan Dhingra, and The Hashgraph Group’s Chief Operating Officer, Deepak Lalan, set out the reasoning behind the build.

Article: [L to R] Deepak Lalan, Head of GCC and Enterprise Programs, The Hashgraph Group and Milan Dhingra, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Teleport

A Bottleneck of Volume and Coordination

Teleport moved more than 167 million parcels across Asia Pacific in 2025, and delivered 61.7 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone, a 122% year-on-year increase, with daily peaks reaching 1.4 million eCommerce parcels. At that throughput, marginal error rates translate quickly into held shipments and costs that no party in the chain absorbs cleanly.

Dhingra characterised the obstacle as structural. Key challenges identified included:

• Fragmented handoffs, where a single cross-border shipment may pass through a merchant, a logistics provider, a freight forwarder, a customs broker, and government agencies at both origin and destination

• Inconsistent formats and standards, with each party working to different formats and timestamps, and handoffs still occurring over email, PDFs, messaging apps and shared spreadsheets

• Persistent clearance delays, with around 43% of organisations reporting shipments held at customs

• Non-harmonised compliance rules, cited by 41% of organisations alongside Harmonised System code requirements

Verifiable Documents, Not Transferable Records

Unlike the eBL, which is an Electronic Transferable Record (ETR), a customs declaration is a Verifiable Document (VD), where what matters is that every party can confirm who submitted what, when, and whether it has been altered since.

Lalan described provenance as the use case the industry keeps returning to. TrackTrace, The Hashgraph Group’s supply chain product, records each critical shipment event with an accompanying audit trail, allowing customs authorities, merchants, and carriers to independently verify what was declared, by whom, and at which point in the journey.

The developers also intend to align the system with the TradeTrust framework because it provides a common framework for issuing and verifying both document types, is open-source, and system-agnostic. This allows all parties to adopt the framework without requiring everyone to use the same platform or technology stack.

A Live Proof of Concept in Malaysia

The project targets Malaysian cross-border eCommerce lanes and high-volume domestic air routes, with completion planned for the first half of 2027. The team is looking to work with real shipments, real documents and real merchants. The project is intended to demonstrate how the approach could be extended to follow volume, lane by lane, with broader industry adoption by logistics operators and customs agencies representing the longer-term opportunity. The architecture is designed to support land, air and sea, and to extend beyond customs into financing, insurance and port operations.

Enabling the Next Phase of Digital Trade

Asked what he found most compelling, Dhingra pointed not to efficiency gains for large operators but to small merchants, who absorb compliance costs that remain largely hidden and are often disproportionate to the size of their business. With regulators in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam each maintaining their own rules, a shared framework for verifiable digital documents enables interoperability while allowing each jurisdiction to retain its own regulatory requirements.

The initiative illustrates how a shared framework for trusted, verifiable digital documents can help governments and businesses exchange trusted information while allowing each jurisdiction to maintain its own regulatory requirements. It reflects a broader shift from digitising individual documents to establishing a globally trusted digital foundation for cross-border trade.

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