CruzLink

One verifiable chain of custody for every shipment, built for a region where no two ports run the same customs system.

Request beta accessSee how it works

Scroll: one shipment, start to finish.

No two ports run the same customs system.

Port Saint Croix has been a trade corridor since the Danish West Indies. What moves through it today has to satisfy five systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

If you ship, carry, receive, clear, or finance cargo here, you already know.

  • U.S. CBP ACE, ocean manifestElectronic, mandatory since 7 March 2026.Simulated
  • CBP duties via Pay.govElectronic since 18 April 2026.Simulated
  • VIBIR Form 721VI, Virgin Islands exciseFiled alongside every cargo submission.Simulated
  • CBP formal entry (non-ABI)Still a manual process.Not connected
  • CARICOMNo single window exists; separate regional and national systems.Reserved

Every shipment, every hand-off, on a phone.

One container arrives by sea at the Containerport on the south shore, is released on documents sent over the fiber, and goes by truck up to Route 66 and east into Christiansted, driving on the left. Each custody event is geotagged, timestamped, and recorded by the person holding it, at the place it happens.

  1. arrival, Port operatorVessel alongside at the Containerport, Krause Lagoon. Prove what arrived and when.
  2. inspection, Customs reviewer, demo roleCBP reviews the documents before release; VIBIR excise is filed online. Both calls are simulated.
  3. pickup, CarrierThe container clears the gate for Route 66. Prove when you took custody.
  4. handoff, CarrierSunny Isle, where Route 66 meets Route 70. Prove when you handed it off.
  5. receipt, Shipper (consignee)Christiansted, near Gallows Bay. Prove what was received, and when.
  6. payment_eligible, Broker and financeRelease payment against a record you did not have to take on faith.
  1. Arrival by sea: Palm Beach to St. Croix, 3 days
  2. Berth: Containerport, more than 90 percent of the territory's goods
  3. Papers on the wire: ACE manifest and VIBIR 721VI, reviewed before release
  4. Gate: the access road to Route 66
  5. Route 66: divided, four lanes, trucks 40 mph, drive on the left
  6. Route 70 into town: the Nielsen Bypass around the one-way grid
  7. Receipt: one record, five events, anyone can check

Map geometry: U.S. Census Bureau TIGER/Line 2024 (public domain). Distances measured on that data from the terminal gate: to Gallows Bay 13.2 km, to the Frederiksted pier 17.5 km, to the airport 7.4 km. Gate position: OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), one node. Ports and depths: VIPA and NOAA Coast Pilot 5 (survey years shown). Cable landings: FCC licence record and a 2025 Virgin Islands CZM filing; the Cirion station, the viNGN ring and the sea lanes are drawn schematically and say so. Drive times are not published and are not shown. Every 2024 storm outage on St. Croix was a power outage, none a cable fault (FCC). Sources as of 2026-09-15.

One verifiable chain of custody.

Every event carries the SHA-256 of the event before it. Change one field anywhere and every hash after it breaks. No blockchain, nothing to procure: a record anyone can check.

  1. 1. arrivalPort operator2026-09-13 13:10Za4619841ef55af4c2230edadfa410f0aa7c421dc9d0c1cf2aca86de9360b33f5
  2. 2. inspectionCustoms reviewer (demo role)2026-09-13 15:42Z20bd4a78dfdf8116c98e0ad8bf9bb3020085f0c1806f8d996c0061bc679d2000
  3. 3. pickupCarrier2026-09-14 08:05Z42f78db9e4defee116e2c9a9649fe7c67e374e864d9c17f86bc41c4facf94c11
  4. 4. handoffCarrier2026-09-14 08:31Zea0a8aea51b0a0b32f101a96d51ffc8f90548f46644cc9a15c5bdf99b09bb110
  5. 5. receiptShipper (consignee)2026-09-14 09:02Zc30d4313fb5bb17b0ae3e4f05ed8fa7d618534e4645da1ae17b060a41f9e3af1

The live check needs JavaScript; the hashes above were computed the same way and are printed as shipped.

Simulated shipment. Real hashes, computed with the same canonical format as the app's database trigger (cruzlink.custody.v1). Append-only, auditable, running on the beta backend

Request beta accessRead the developer docs

CruzLink is a role-based mobile app for the Port Saint Croix trade corridor. Shippers, carriers, port operators, and brokers file, review, and confirm shipments from a phone. Every custody event is geotagged, timestamped, and chained to the one before it, so the record of a shipment can be verified by anyone who needs to trust it.

What the beta proves

A single corridor scenario, walked end to end on real phones against a real backend: a shipment filed with its commercial documents, reviewed with a landed-cost estimate, cleared, received at the port, and its payment eligibility acknowledged. The connections to U.S. Customs (ACE) and the VI Bureau of Internal Revenue's excise system are simulated and labeled Simulated everywhere they appear; no live filing happens yet. All shipments in the beta are synthetic test data, never a real commercial shipment.

Where it stands

TestFlight and Play Store beta enrollment are targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026. See how it works for the corridor walk in detail, or the demo hub for screenshots from the first end-to-end run. Engineers wanting the data model can start with the developer docs.

Questions people ask

Does CruzLink connect to U.S. Customs' ACE system?

ACE now handles two things for U.S. Virgin Islands cargo: electronic ocean manifest filing (mandatory since March 7, 2026) and electronic duty and tax payment via Pay.gov (effective April 18, 2026). CruzLink simulates this connection in Phase I: filing a shipment produces a plausible, clearly labeled Simulated ACE submission, never a real one.

What about the actual customs decision, not just the manifest?

That's the one piece that hasn't gone electronic yet. CBP's own current guidance treats Virgin Islands formal entry filing as a manual (non-ABI) process, distinct from the now-electronic manifest and payment steps. CruzLink's customs-review screen models exactly this decision (the human review, the landed-cost estimate, approve or hold), precisely the step still waiting on its own modernization.

Is the VI Bureau of Internal Revenue's excise tax part of this too?

Yes, and it's a separate agency from CBP entirely. VIBIR administers Virgin Islands excise tax (Form 721VI), required alongside every CBP cargo submission. CruzLink models it as its own adapter, not a variant of the CBP one, because it is genuinely a different system.

Does CruzLink connect to the CARICOM Single Window?

Not today, and Port Saint Croix isn't in a CARICOM member state to begin with (the USVI holds an early technical-cooperation relationship with CARICOM, not membership). There also isn't one unified "CARICOM Single Window" to connect to: the region runs narrower shared systems for specific data plus separate national customs systems per country. CruzLink's architecture reserves a CARICOM-facing adapter for exactly this reason, ready for whichever real system a future corridor needs.

Why simulate all of this instead of waiting to connect for real?

Because these are genuinely different systems at genuinely different stages, not one integration wearing different labels. CruzLink's data model treats every government or partner system as its own independent adapter, simulated and clearly badged until proven, switched on one at a time as each becomes real, not as a single bet on one assumption.

What do you mean by "no two ports run the same customs system"?

It's a plain-language description of this corridor, not trade terminology (the formal term is "single window," national or regional, and this region has none). Several government systems, at different levels of digitization, none alike: that is the shape the app is built for.

Hero photographs, both illustrative: Christiansted's public wharf on a postcard of about 1910 (Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, public domain), and the same waterfront in 2015, photo by Prayitno, CC BY 2.0.