A high-tech startup founded by former Deloitte blockchain executives today unveiled an industry-agnostic supply chain solution designed to improve transparency, efficiency, and product visibility in legacy systems.
Citizens Reserve’s SUKU project is a blockchain-based ecosystem that delivers supply chain-as-a-service to businesses. The platform is intended to make supply chains more efficient, transparent, and secure, helping companies open new markets, streamline operations, and reduce operating costs. SUKU has already attracted interest from five sectors: vaccines, commodities, electronics, honey, and defense.
Eric Piscini, CEO of Citizens Reserve, told CoinJournal that the company is transforming enterprise platforms using blockchain technology.
“The idea emerged from the realization that blockchain efforts were overly focused on consumer use cases and not sufficiently on B2B operations,” he said. “Many projects concentrated on the technology layer rather than on enabling business outcomes.”
Piscini added that the company’s name reflects a belief that decentralization and broad participation will reshape how value is created and exchanged in the future.
Before joining Citizens Reserve, Piscini was a partner at Deloitte Consulting, where he founded and grew the blockchain practice from 2012 to 2018 to about 1,200 professionals. He developed strategies and platforms to accelerate enterprise blockchain adoption. He left Deloitte in April 2018 to join Citizens Reserve as COO and became CEO in July of the same year.
Through the SUKU ecosystem, Citizens Reserve aims to give trading partners several key advantages: access to real-time, transparent information about the exact location and status of goods; privacy protections for participants; a marketplace for bids and orders; full auditability of activities; and automation of contractual agreements. The platform plans to use two blockchains: Ethereum and Quorum. Ethereum will be used to process supply chain payments, while Quorum will handle confidential transactions such as bids and offers.
According to Piscini, traditional supply chains face five main problems that SUKU seeks to address: lack of transparency, low efficiency, poor integration, limited access to capital, and weakened trust. SUKU’s supply chain-as-a-service is designed to tackle each of these issues.
“Today’s supply chain environment is complex and difficult to navigate,” he said. “Almost all enterprises rely on supply chains in some form, yet the supporting technology remains costly, inefficient, and fragmented.”
Global companies work with numerous partners across many countries, which magnifies the challenges of traditional supply chains. Whether sourcing a supplier in the United States or moving goods from India to Europe, the absence of consistent standards undermines transparency and complicates operations.
Counterfeit and fake goods are an example of where blockchain can improve provenance and traceability. The OECD estimates that global imports of counterfeit and pirated goods amount to hundreds of billions of dollars annually, representing a significant share of international trade and underscoring the need for better supply chain controls.
Piscini pointed to high-profile pharmaceutical scandals as further evidence of the need for a unified layer that enables trading partners to communicate reliably and transact securely.
“From hardware to energy, industries that depend on supply chains take on substantial risk when working with unverified partners,” he said. “A decentralized ecosystem provides intrinsic value by enabling trustless interactions and reducing single points of failure.”
With SUKU displaying the location and condition of goods in real time, participants can act proactively rather than reactively when issues occur. The platform also aims to open access to new marketplaces and technologies, helping companies find better suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.
SUKU’s native token will be used to incentivize and reward participants on the platform. Piscini outlined three intended functions of the token:
- Payment of transaction fees on the platform;
- Access to premium features based on token holdings — for example, real-time market data and supplier ratings, similar to data services used by financial institutions;
- Governance — token holders can vote on future platform capabilities. Winning proposals will be developed and delivered by one of SUKU’s technology partners.
In addition to SUKU, Citizens Reserve is developing another project called ZERV. ZERV aims to be a decentralized commerce platform tailored to the defense industry, enabling frictionless transactions that create new business opportunities and improve time-to-market and transaction cost efficiencies.