It costs money to move commercial goods around the planet—a lot of money. Blockchain technology holds the power to save, prevent fraud, cut the high price of risk and get everything where it’s going faster.

The Distributed: Trade conference, to be held at St. Louis’s Washington University on June 14, 2016, is a new and exciting forum bringing the industry’s leading blockchain technology companies together with major enterprises to brainstorm how the new technology will disrupt and optimize both global trade networks and financial services, achieving efficiencies never before imagined.

Speakers at the conference will include key innovators in supply chain and trade finance solutions, some of whom will actually demo applications in the works to dramatically reduce the costs and risks of commercial goods supply chain management.

Speakers will include: Leanne Kemp, Founder and CEO, Everledger;Dominik Schiener, Founder, CargoChain, Chris Patteson, Director, Transaction Risk, Collaboration & Intelligence, FedEx; Santosh Sankar, Director, Dynamo; Madhav Goparaju, Executive Director, Financial Services Advisory, Ernst & Young; Marc Christman, Senior Vice President, Accounts Payable Automation, Commerce Bank; and Lamar Wilson, CEO, Fluent, an enterprise blockchain platform powering applications designed to increase efficiency in global trade and supply chain finance.

“Currently, bank-run trade finance programs require a tremendous amount of resource-intensive due diligence, document collection and processing, including coordination of remittance information,” said Fluent’s Lamar Wilson. “Financing rates are high for the businesses despite the low and shrinking margins for the financing provider. This is especially true at smaller banks who lack this infrastructure and must outsource these services for their larger clients.”

Fluent offers applications for real-time B2B payments, supply chain finance and a peer-to-peer working capital marketplace. The company is just one of those who will take part in Distributed: Trade, showcasing blockchain solutions, answering questions in panel format, and brainstorming with conference attendees.

The Distributed: Trade conference is being presented by BTC Media in partnership with SixThirty, a leading fintech accelerator in the U.S., and is the first global event focusing on blockchain technology applications for both trade networks and financial services.

Attached to the event is a 24-hour Hackathon to start on June 12^th and offering $25,000 in cash prizes for the best new blockchain tech application. Teams from universities around the nation will compete.

Other executive leaders and tech entrepreneurs speaking at the conference event will include: Judd Bagley, Director of Communications at Overstock.com and Chief Evangelist at Overstock’s financial technology subsidiary t0; Micah Winkelspecht, CEO of Gem, an enterprise blockchain application platform; and Jeff Garzik, Bitcoin Core developer and Cofounder of Bloq.

Distributed: Trade sponsors and speakers will continue to be announced in the coming weeks.  Early bird registration is now open and discount registration tickets will remain available for purchase through May 20.