Abstract
Since Bitcoin’s debut in 2008, blockchain, the technology behind the cryptocurrency, has been gaining increasing scientific and industrial interest. Due to the technology’s innate distributed and immutable features, the adoption of blockchains on supply chains is one of the most promising recent applications. In this survey, we review academic researches and implementations of distributed ledgers on supply chains. We present the current state of research on the subject and summarize the benefits and the challenges of the distributed organization and management of supply chains. Focusing on industrial practices and use cases, we discuss the technical characteristics and maturity of the various industrial projects. Our goal is to assess the applicability of blockchains in the supply chain domain and to provide a foundation for practitioners and researchers to direct their future projects towards improving the technology and its applications.
Highlights
Distributed ledger technologies found themselves in the spotlight after the publication of Nakamoto’s white paper on Bitcoin [1], the cryptocurrency that uses Blockchain, the most popular distributed ledger to this day
From the analysis conducted in the previous paragraphs, we summarize the following key findings with regards to the research questions posed in Section III concerning the applicability and application of blockchain technology in supply chains
RQ16: From the papers we mined for our review, we conclude that the existing literature can be classified in three large groups: (a) theoretical analyses that address the benefits, the challenges and/or the limitations of the technology being applied on supply chains (c.20% of the reviewed literature), (b) conceptual systems for case studies or to showcase the applicability of the technology (c.38% of the reviewed literature) and (c) implemented systems for industrial case studies (c.41% of the reviewed literature)
Summary
Distributed ledger technologies found themselves in the spotlight after the publication of Nakamoto’s white paper on Bitcoin [1], the cryptocurrency that uses Blockchain, the most popular distributed ledger to this day. Thousands of scientific papers, blog articles, industry guides and financial reports have been written on what is a blockchain and the ways in which it has entered the industrial, financial and technological worlds. Let us consider a network of entities engaged in exchanging assets, or making transactions, with each other. Such activities would require a central organization to manage them and act as an intermediary for any payment or transaction. A blockchain provides the infrastructure for such activities to happen in a transparent, secure and reliable way, without the need of the central organization. Because the blocks have been validated by the network, all chains are identical, providing a distributed ledger ensuring data synchronization across the network. The chain structure is a key characteristic that facilitates the reliability and immutability of the ledger, as each block contains
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