The Stranded Cargo Liquidity Hub automatically connects diverted, at-risk bulk commodities with pre-vetted regional buyers in minutes — not weeks. No manual searching. No phone calls. Just automated matching to prevent food spoilage and secure local supply.
Layer 5 of Chokepoint Sentinel — see the full five-layer proposal →
Where the cargo actually ends up
What a manual search costs
Four steps between a route failing and grain sitting in a local silo. Every step to the right of the diversion runs without a human in the loop — that is the whole claim, and the elapsed time across it is the number this system should be judged on.
Swipe the schematic sideways →
Schematic of the sequence, not a screenshot — none of it is deployed. The bracket is the claim: every step right of the diversion is automated, and the elapsed time between a cargo registering at an unplanned berth and a signed local offer is what this layer lives or dies on.
When the twin detects or predicts a chokepoint failure, it ranks the nearest safe, operational ports by draft, berth availability, storage capacity and inland reach — not by distance alone — and the vessel is diverted to one of them. The registration of that arrival is the event everything below hangs off: the moment a cargo becomes stranded is the moment the system knows it is stranded.
The instant the cargo is logged at the alternate port, the engine scans a pre-vetted registry of regional buyers — flour mills, national and provincial food reserves, nearby commercial traders — and returns only those able to take that commodity, in that tonnage, inside the remaining shelf life. Vetting happens in advance, with the host government. Nobody is discovering a counterparty during a crisis.
The cargo is now in a market it was never priced for. The system computes a discount against the prevailing local rate from a formula published beforehand — remaining shelf life, storage and demurrage at that berth, tonnage, haulage to the buyer’s silo — and shows both sides the working. Roughly ten per cent below local spot is the illustrative shape of it. The number is disclosed, symmetric and auditable.
Matched buyers receive a signed notification: 5,000 tonnes of milling wheat at Djibouti, 10% below local spot, twelve days of shelf life remaining. Acceptance transfers title against a digital contract, the seller is compensated on that instrument instead of waiting out a claim, and the grain moves into local silos while it is still food rather than waste.
For cargo owners, traders and charterers holding goods that are suddenly in the wrong country. The commercial risk of a diversion lands on you, and it lands immediately.
Diverted cargo should not rot at an alternate port while you spend a fortnight looking for someone to take it. The registry already knows who in that region can absorb your tonnage, and it is queried the moment your ship berths — not after you have exhausted your own contacts.
The engine computes the exact distress discount needed to move the cargo now, from a formula you can read before you ever use the system. You recover capital in days on a digital instrument rather than at the end of a claim cycle — and you are not giving the cargo away to do it.
No local brokers to call, no buyers to find, no market you do not operate in to learn under time pressure. The verified buyers come to your diverted cargo. Your side of the transaction is reading an offer and accepting it.
For regional mills, provincial buyers and national food reserves in the country the cargo happens to have landed in. A diversion is a supply shock somewhere else and an opportunity here — if you hear about it in time.
An automated notification the moment a critical commodity — milling wheat, maize, rice, edible oil — is diverted into your port, with tonnage, grade, remaining shelf life and the computed price already attached. Not a rumour from a broker three days later.
Access bulk commodities at the published distress discount before they are absorbed into the open market at full price. The discount exists because the seller needs speed, and it is calculated from the same formula the seller sees.
Every listing carries the port and satellite telemetry that confirms what is physically on the berth — quantity, commodity, grade and origin — before the offer is ever generated. You are not taking a stranger’s word for a cargo you cannot see.
The order in which offers go out is not commercial. A national or provincial food reserve holds right of first refusal on any cargo landed in its territory before a commercial trader is shown the offer. This is a placement tool for the country the food arrived in, not a channel for taking that food back out of it.
Traditional marketplaces make humans bid against each other. This one does not have a bidding floor at all — the engine computes a price from published inputs and puts one offer in front of the buyers who can actually take the cargo.
Commodity class (dry grain behaves nothing like edible oil or chilled cargo), ambient conditions at that berth, storage available and days already elapsed. The output is how fast this cargo must move, and it sets the urgency every other input is weighed against.
The engine checks regional inventory before it prices. If the local area is already long on wheat, a deeper discount will not clear the cargo locally — so the search widens to the next region with haulage costed in, rather than driving the local price into the floor.
Once the engine has an eligible buyer at a computed price, acceptance executes the transfer against a digital contract — title moves, escrow releases on confirmed handover, and the movement order is issued. No counter-offers, no round trips.
This is the only part of Sentinel that sits near money changing hands, so its boundaries are part of the design rather than a policy written afterwards. A matching engine for food in a shortage can go wrong in obvious ways, and each of these exists to close one of them.
We never take title, and we never hold cargo. This is the matching and pricing layer between a seller and a vetted buyer. It does not trade the commodity, does not warehouse it, and has no inventory position that a deeper discount would benefit.
The fee is fixed, and it is not a share of the discount. A percentage of the spread would pay us to price the seller down in a famine. A flat matching fee per completed transfer cannot.
No auction, no order book, no watchable market. Buyers see an offer computed from the published formula, not each other’s hands.
Standing: the registry is vetted with the host government, and a national or provincial food reserve holds right of first refusal before any commercial trader sees the offer.
The four metrics this layer would be instrumented on. None of these are measurements. The system has never run; each figure below is arithmetic from a stated assumption, shown to make the shape of the return legible — and each one is labelled so it stays legible in a screenshot.
48,000 t
Food saved from spoilage per year.
Arithmetic: 12 diversions a year × 4,000 t average bulk parcel, all of it placed. Both numbers are assumptions, not observations — the diversion rate is ours and the parcel size is a round figure for a handysize grain cargo.
$14.4M
Seller capital recovered rather than written off.
Arithmetic: 48,000 t × roughly $300/t milling wheat = cargo value that reaches a buyer instead of a landfill. It is gross cargo value moved, not profit, and not money anyone has saved.
9 regions
Local markets given supply they would not otherwise have seen.
Arithmetic: assumes the 12 modelled diversions land across 9 distinct port hinterlands. A count of regions touched, which is not the same as a claim about food security outcomes in them.
4.2 hrs
Target time from berth registration to signed local offer.
Arithmetic: matching and pricing are computed in seconds; the whole figure is assumed buyer response latency. It is a design target to be measured against, not a result. The honest comparison is the fortnight a manual search takes.
A matching engine is only worth anything if both sides can trust that the cargo is physically where the listing says and that the money moves when the goods do. Neither is taken on faith.
A listing is not generated when someone claims to have cargo. It is generated after port telemetry and satellite observation confirm the physical presence of the goods at the alternate berth — vessel identity, berth, discharge status and tonnage. The listing is downstream of the evidence, which is the opposite of how a classified advert works.
Bounds: telemetry confirms presence, tonnage and origin. It does not assay grade — grade travels with the cargo documents and is a matter for the surveyor, and the page should not imply a satellite can tell you protein content.
Funds are held in automated escrow rather than moving on a handshake. The moment title transfers and local port authorities confirm the handover, the seller is paid on that instrument — no chargebacks and no waiting out a claim cycle. The buyer’s exposure ends at a cargo that was verified before they saw it; the seller’s ends at a confirmed release.
Bounds: escrow is a licensed activity in every jurisdiction this would operate in. The design assumes a regulated banking or payments partner holds the funds. We do not, and would not, hold them ourselves.