Transforming the supply-chain management and industry logistics with blockchain smart contracts

Abstract

Blockchain technology back in 2009 was mainly used for finance use cases due to the cryptocurrency support of the Bitcoin and the Ethereum networks. Nowadays with the emergence of business oriented distributed ledger frameworks we can find blockchain (BC) in almost every aspect of our everyday real-life transactions. Starting with supply chain, BC has been used to support and secure education, e-government, real estate, insurance, healthcare and other business cases. Regarding blockchain in supply chain, examples as the Walmart and IBM partnership shows that smart contracts (SC) and cryptocurrencies can disrupt the way suppliers, shippers, retailers and customers trust each other and interact. This paper describes how we applied BC technology in two real-life supply chain scenarios. The first one is for logging and tracing products, showing how we can use SCs to identify the ingredients of food products and how to uniquely identify the food product throughout its shipment from the factory to the customer who purchase it. Important aspects of this route is the transparency of the process as well as the verification of transport. The second one deals with how authentication works for users holding BC identities. The identity of a user is important in order to secure the network, allowing only permissioned parties to access it and perform actions on the data. As long as the network is private and immutable, authenticating and authorizing users is crucial for enforcing the end-to-end security to increase users' trust and protect the confidentiality of data. While exploring these two scenarios we define the actors, the transactions these actors can perform on the systems and we propose the SCs that have to be implemented for these use cases to take advantage of BC's unique characteristics, as immutability and non-repudiation. In addition, we provide sample template SCs for both scenarios.