Teleport moved more than 167 million parcels across Asia Pacific in 2025. That figure is already out of date. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the company delivered 61.7 million parcels. Volume climbed 122% year over year, and daily peaks reached 1.4 million ecommerce parcels.
Teleport is Capital A’s logistics venture and Southeast Asia’s largest air logistics network. In April 2026, it partnered with The Hashgraph Group to attack a problem that grows with that volume. Together they are co-developing a Digital Customs Documentation System, or DCDS, on Hedera. Genfinity’s Ryan Solomon spoke with Milan Dhingra, Teleport’s chief product and technology officer, and Deepak Lalan, who recently stepped into the chief operating officer role at The Hashgraph Group. Their conversation focused on one layer of the trade stack that rarely gets attention: the documents.
The scale that makes small errors expensive
Dhingra owns both what Teleport builds and how it builds it. That covers product strategy, data, and engineering. At Teleport’s volume, he said, decisions carry immediate consequences for real merchants. The math behind that claim is simple. A small error rate compounds fast when you process over a million parcels a day.
The announcement cites research that frames the bottleneck clearly. Roughly 43% of organizations report shipments delayed at customs. Another 41% point to complex, non-harmonized compliance rules and Harmonised System code requirements. In other words, nearly half the industry keeps hitting the same wall. One misdeclared value can hold a shipment for days, and nobody in the chain absorbs that cost cleanly.
Customs is a coordination problem, not a paperwork problem
Dhingra pushed back on the idea that the industry ignored this. Everyone has tried to solve it, he said. The real obstacle is structural complexity. Consider what a single cross-border shipment actually touches. A merchant hands off to a logistics provider, then possibly a freight forwarder, then a customs broker, then a government agency at origin and another at destination.
Each party runs different formats, different timestamps, and different standards. As a result, the handoffs still happen over email, PDFs, WhatsApp, Google Sheets, and WeChat. Dhingra called that the honest state of the industry today. Nobody upgrades willingly, because the cost of getting a correction wrong is too high. Consequently, the friction lives in coordination rather than in any single company’s software.
What verifiable identity changes at the document layer
Lalan described provenance as the use case the industry keeps returning to. TrackTrace, The Hashgraph Group’s supply chain product, anchors shipment events on Hedera. It uses cryptographically verified decentralized identifiers, or DIDs, and the Hedera Consensus Service. Each critical event writes an immutable record with an audit trail attached. Customs officers can then unwrap a document set and confirm which stakeholder submitted what.
Dhingra reframed the benefit in operational terms. A customs authority can verify a declared value independently. A merchant can prove the commodity code and manifest matched the shipment. Meanwhile, Teleport can demonstrate that a handover happened exactly as documented. That shift moves the industry out of dispute resolution mode, which Dhingra called the current default, and toward proactive transparency.
Chain of custody matters more as cargo mixes. Dangerous goods and precious metals need to show who held them, for how long, and what they did. Notably, The Hashgraph Group has already paired digital records with physical verification elsewhere. Its June 2026 collaboration with Merck links M-Trust security pigments to a TrackTrace digital twin on Hedera. Lalan described that pairing of physical and digital as the direction the whole category is heading.
Why the stack runs on Hedera
Lalan gave three practical reasons enterprises land on Hedera for this workload. Throughput comes first, because most distributed ledgers cannot absorb hundreds of millions of shipment events. Hedera reaches finality in under three seconds, which keeps clearance workflows moving. Cost predictability comes second, and it matters more than people expect. Hedera prices transactions in fixed, USD-denominated fees rather than volatile token amounts.
That detail turns a technical choice into a budgeting choice. A CTO planning for 200 million parcels can earmark a transaction budget two years out. On networks with floating gas costs, that forecast falls apart. Third, Lalan pointed to enterprise support, and he used Linux as the analogy. Early enterprises avoided Linux because no vendor answered when something broke. Hedera’s governing council, plus support from The Hashgraph Group and The Hashgraph Association, gives buyers a service level agreement instead of a mailing list.
The system also plugs into TradeTrust, the framework developed by Singapore’s IMDA. TradeTrust aligns electronic trade documents with the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records. Singapore, the UK, and several US states already recognize documents built to that standard. Therefore, DCDS records carry legal weight rather than convenience value alone. AI-assisted HS code validation then sits on top, cutting misclassification before it reaches an officer.
Malaysia first, with live shipments only
The project sits at proof of concept stage today. It targets Malaysian cross-border ecommerce lanes and high-volume domestic air routes. Dhingra stressed one condition repeatedly. This is not a sandbox, and the team wants live environments with real shipments, real documents, and real merchants. Completion is planned for the first half of 2027.
Expansion then follows volume, lane by lane. The bigger milestone arrives when other logistics operators and customs agencies adopt the same records. Lalan framed the design as deliberately open to that outcome. The architecture supports land, air, and sea, and it can extend past customs into financing, insurance, and port operations. He also invited customs authorities directly to join the build.
The smaller merchant is the real target
Asked what excites him most, Dhingra skipped the efficiency gains for large operators. He pointed instead at small merchants. A seller shipping from Thailand to Singapore absorbs compliance costs that stay largely hidden. Those costs also sit wildly out of proportion to the size of the business. A portable, verifiable trade identity would change that equation.
Dhingra was direct about the scope. This is not a Teleport-only solution, and interoperability is the point. Southeast Asia runs regulators in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam, each with its own rules. A shared record layer lets them interoperate without surrendering local control. That, more than clearance speed, is what makes the document layer worth rebuilding.
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