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Blockchain Implementations and Use Cases for Supply Chains – A Survey

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DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2964880

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Lasse Herskind

Nicola Dragoni

Technical University of Denmark

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.

Number of published articles on blockchains for supply chains per year. The plot refers to the peer-reviewed papers included in this study.

…

Thematic categories identified in the body of reviewed papers

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Blockchain Implementations and Use

Cases for Supply Chains – A Survey

PETER GONCZOL, PANAGIOTA KATSIKOULI, LASSE HERSKIND and NICOLA DRAGONI

DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark

Corresponding author: Panagiota Katsikouli (e-mail: panka@ dtu.dk).

This work was supported by the Danish Industry Foundation (Industriens Fonds) under Grant 2019-0046.

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.

INDEX TERMS blockchain, distributed ledger technology, implementations and use cases, supply chains

I. INTRODUCTION

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.

Ever since, thousands of scientiﬁc papers, blog articles, in-

dustry 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 exchang-

ing assets, or making transactions, with each other. Tradition-

ally, 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. For a

transaction to be valid, it must be registered in a block, that

the network has agreed upon through a consensus mecha-

nism. After validation, the nodes append the block to their

privately maintained chains. 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 fa-

cilitates the reliability and immutability of the ledger, as each

block contains a hash of the contents of the previous block on

the chain. Therefore, once a transaction is registered on the

blockchain it cannot be tampered with, as such a malicious

act will manifest itself as an inconsistency between the block

hashes of the individually maintained chains. This allows

to trace down the origin and progression of all registered

activities.

The traceability property of blockchains, as it is better

known, is one of the features that attracted the attention

of the business and ﬁnancial worlds. Organizations in these

regimes are often part of large and complex networks where

transactions are happening for products and services to ﬁnd

their ways from production and creation to consumption and

use. Consider for example a product such as a chair. The

life cycle of a chair starts in a forest, in the form of a tree

trunk and ends with the chair bought at a local retailer’s. The

journey from one end to the other involves many different

stages, both industrial and ﬁnancial. In terms of industrial

activities, those include the cutting of the tree trunk, its

shipment to a furniture factory, the design of the chair and

the crafting of the log into the chair. In terms of the ﬁnancial

activities, those include the furniture manufacturer buying

logs from a forestry supplier, the manufacturer employing

shipment companies for the transfers etc. These are only

but a few of the activities that happen in the life cycle of a

product. In the business and ﬁnancial worlds, the network of

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FIGURE 1. Example of a supply chain for furniture products [2]

organizations, companies, retailers, suppliers and consumers,

as well as the activities and transactions between them, form

the supply chain of a product or service. An example of a

supply chain for furniture is shown in Figure 1, taken from

Appelhanz et al. [2].

In this work, we present a holistic overview of the literature

on blockchain adoption in supply chains. As such, we will

discuss and summarize the adoption barriers, challenges and

beneﬁts that have been addressed in the related literature,

from the point of view of the industrial world but also from

the point of view of the technical experts. What is more,

we will present and summarize actual implementations, use

cases and proof of concepts of supply chains implemented

on a blockchain system, and critically discuss their technical

characteristics and limitations.

Contributions Our contributions are summarized as follows:

•We offer a holistic literature review of the recent works

on blockchains in supply chains, including both the

ﬁnancial/business perspective and the technical one.

•We discuss and summarize adoption barriers and chal-

lenges as well as adoption beneﬁts for supply chain

manufacturers.

•We present actual industrial implementations and use

cases as well as proof of concept cases, we discuss their

technical characteristics, design choices and limitations.

•From the analysis of the related literature, we identify

open issues and potential research directions for the

advancement and improvement of the ﬁeld, both for the

industry and the scientiﬁc community.

Outline The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In

Section II, we discuss preliminaries of supply chains and

their implementation with the use of a distributed ledger,

as well as we review existing surveys on the subject. In

Section III, we describe the followed approach for selecting

the works to be included in our review and pose the research

questions we set forth in answering. Section IV hosts the

body of reviewed works and our analysis for answering

the posed research questions. Reﬂections and open research

issues are discussed in Section V and we conclude the survey

in Section VI.

II. BLOCKCHAINS AND SUPPLY CHAINS

Traditionally, a supply chain seeks to satisfy consumer’s

needs for a product or service with the least amount of

inventory for the producer or/and retailer. Many supply chain

management models have been designed since the 80’s, when

the term Supply Chain Management was introduced, trying

to meet the needs of the various manufacturing networks.

A few such requirements include (but are not limited to)

the minimization of costs from transactions and inventories,

the elimination of bottlenecks along a supply chain (due

to delayed payments or supply deliveries, for example), the

creation of chains resilient to changes due to bad economy or

shortage of primary materials, the traceability of a product’s

origins in a secure and trustful way, the employment of local

producers and labor force, the minimization of transportation

needs and the delivery of the best quality products to the end

consumer [3], [4].

The blockchain data structure by default satisﬁes many

of these requirements for an effective and efﬁcient supply

chain; therefore, it is an obvious choice for industries and

their ﬁnancial partners to use it for managing their supply

chains [5].

Traceability Tracing the origins of a product is especially

important for the quality management of sensitive products,

such as food or medicine. The recent history has unfortu-

nately a few instances where food was tampered with, was

expired or infected, yet promoted as fresh, causing diseases

to consumers [6], [7]. With the current supply chain manage-

ment solutions, it can take a long time to trace the infected

batches or the origin of the problem, spreading the infected

food and diseases to a larger percentage of the population.

The timestamped registration of all information regarding the

production, shipment and sales of any particular product on

a blockchain would allow for identifying the roots of such

cases instantly. Also, tampering with the quality of products

in any way would be signiﬁcantly more difﬁcult when using

blockchains for their supply chain, because the database

requires constant validation of the transactions registered on

it, not just by the network partner that handles the particular

stage of the supply chain, but by the whole network. This

guarantees a single truth and no need for negotiations and

reconciliation between the various participants of the supply

chain.

Distribution The distributed nature of the technology is one

of the features that make blockchains attractive for supply

chain implementations, as it implies a number of beneﬁts.

Firstly, since there is no central organization managing the

transactions and storing the supply chain activities and every

node in the network maintains a copy of these, fault or exclu-

sion of some network nodes (e.g., bankruptcy of a supplier)

would not cause the whole supply chain to collapse, nor the

activities to be lost. Secondly, the fact that all transactions and

information is stored on all nodes of the network, although

it creates a kind of duplication of data, it also inspires trust

and security between the cooperating partners, as not just

a small group of them has access to sensitive data. Thirdly,

costly transactions are avoided with the use of blockchain, as

the system effectively decreases the need of intermediaries

for every transaction and uses the same network for all its

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activities.

Immutability The immutability property is perhaps the most

celebrated one, as it protects the users of a blockchain from

numerous fraudulent attempts and adversaries. The traceabil-

ity property is a direct consequence of the fact that once

information is registered on the chain it cannot be altered.

It is noted throughout literature that perfect immutability

does not exist, since theoretically, a majority of the network

can coordinate to tamper with the information on the chain.

However, this is practically infeasible.

A. RELATED SURVEYS

The adoption of blockchain technology in supply chains is

a relatively new subject and as such, there is only a small

number of reviews of the related literature1[8]–[15].

In our view, the most comprehensive systematic literature

review is the work of Wang et al. [8]. The key contributions

in the review are the discussion of key adoption drivers,

the identiﬁcation of areas of most provided value, and the

investigation of barriers of further diffusion of blockchain

technology within the supply chain. A similar discussion

is presented in [9], as part of a broader survey reviewing

industrial applications across different domains.

Two recent works [10], [11] examine the enabling

and constraining roles of the technology from a busi-

ness/management oriented perspective, while [12] system-

atizes the theoretical implications of adopting blockchain in

supply chains, again from the spectrum of industries and

management. In another recent work [13] the authors analyse

the impact of distributed ledger technology on different sup-

ply chain ﬂows through case studies. Tribis et al. [14] offer

a systematic mapping study focusing on the research aspect

of blockchains, identifying research trends and challenges

that remain unresolved. Saberi et al. [16] present a survey

on the adoption of distributed ledger technology in vari-

ous organizations and host in their work summary statistics

useful in benchmarking the current practice. Finally, [15]

conducts a brief literature review with the goal to introduce

the blockchain technology and what it may be used for. How-

ever, the emphasis of the paper is on providing a reference

implementation of a logistics monitoring system, and as such

it will be further analyzed in later sections.

A technical perspective The above-mentioned reviews de-

scribe the impact of the technology from a ﬁnancial, business

and management oriented perspective. As such, the technical

details of applying blockchain in supply chain are not sufﬁ-

ciently discussed. The desired properties of digital solutions,

such as traceability and immutability, can be translated into

speciﬁc software and tooling choices. These design decisions

however are usually tradeoffs introducing new challenges to

tackle, e.g the scalability of such systems and digital-physical

product linkage. Hence, their use needs to be thoroughly

assessed and understood before incorporating into existing

software.

1By the time of writing this manuscript, which is early October 2019

III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

In this work, our goal is to review the existing scientiﬁc

literature regarding supply chains designed based on the

blockchain technology. One of the elements we wish to

investigate is the type of research that has been conducted

on the subject and the existing approaches so far. Exactly

because this is a relatively new subject, coming from the

increasing interest for blockchains from various areas where

the technology can be applied, apart from cryptocurrencies,

it is not a surprise to us that the vast majority of literature

comes with a business and ﬁnancial proﬁle. Therefore, one

of our research points is to separate the technical approaches

from the conceptual ones, and further analyse the various

research thematics within each category. Another research

question we ask in this study has to do with the existence

of implemented blockchain-based systems for supply chain

cases and the technical details or/and limitations of such

systems. Next, we want to identify the impact of the tech-

nology from its (potential) application on supply chains,

as well as the various challenges that it poses. Finally, we

discuss the various problems that remain unsolved after the

application of blockchain technology in supply chains, as

well as research gaps and open issues that literature has

not addressed yet. We summarize our research points in the

following questions:

RQ1 What are the existing research approaches on the sub-

ject of blockchains for supply chains?

RQ2 What type of supply chains can be implemented on a

distributed ledger?

RQ3 What are the existing blockhain-based supply chain

implemented systems? What are their design choices and

technical characteristics?

RQ4 What are the beneﬁts from the adoption of blockchain

technology on supply chains?

RQ5 What are the challenges to be addressed?

RQ6 What are the current research gaps and open problems?

To answer these points, we perform a literature review by

conducting two different searches: ﬁrstly, we search for peer-

reviewed papers hosted in scientiﬁc databases. Secondly, we

run a search on generic search engines for missed peer-

reviewed papers and other articles. Next, we discuss the

details and results of these searches.

Search for scientiﬁc papers In order to identify the useful

peer-reviewed articles for our work, we looked in two differ-

ent sources. Firstly, we applied the snow-balling technique

on the existing literature reviews on the subject (presented

in Subsection II-A), from where we acquired a total of

29 unique papers related to blockchain in supply chains.

Secondly, we conducted keyword-based searches on the fol-

lowing databases: Google Scholar, IEEE, ACM, DTU Find-

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it2. For the purposes of our survey, the searches we conducted

were combinations of the following keywords:

blockchain, distributed ledger, supply chain, implementation

With regards to the industry applications, in particular,

apart from the peer reviewed studies we mined, there exist

many useful articles published through university reposito-

ries, white papers/articles detailing the experiences of prac-

titioners on the subject, industry white papers and short

technical descriptions on project landing pages. Given the

young age of the subject and the small number of good

research existing on it, we decided to include such articles

in our pool of mined related works, if by reading them we

found their material and information invaluable, even though

they are not peer-reviewed.

Search on generic engines By applying the same keywords

as before, we conducted another search on the Google search

engine. That resulted in a myriad of articles written in blogs

and news portals. Apart from a few studies on the blockchain

technology in the supply chain landscape [17]–[19] that we

deemed interesting, we decided to ignore the rest of the

search results since they massively represent non-reviewed

author opinions.

By applying forward snowballing to the citations of the

mined articles, we enriched our pool of mined papers with

many papers and projects on the subject.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria We deﬁned the following

inclusion (IC) and exclusion (EC) criteria for considering,

or not, a mined paper/project description in our review. We

use the notations PROJ and PR to indicate criteria speciﬁc to

implementation-related works and projects or peer-reviewed

papers, respectively. Criteria without a notation were applied

to all mined papers. We deliberately chose criteria that are

highly permissive to avoid overseeing projects with advanced

technology but sub-optimal communication. We note here,

that as we include industrial projects and implementations,

we do so only for cases where there is proof of the existence

of the project (at some stage of its implementation) or/and

sufﬁcient documentation of the system’s description.

IC1 The paper should be published after 2010.

IC2 From the title and abstract of the paper or the description

of the project, it must be clear that the work considers the

application of distributed ledger technologies on some type

of supply chain.

IC3 [PROJ] There should exist a minimal description of the

system.

EC1 Non accessible paper or non available full-paper doc-

ument.

EC2 [PR] The length of paper is less than 4 pages.

2DTU Find-it is the scientiﬁc database offered by the Technical University

of Denmark, which already contains publications from sources such as

IEEE, ACM etc. For completion and to avoid cases of missed hits, we run

all searches in all databases.

FIGURE 2. Number of published articles on blockchains for supply chains per

year. The plot refers to the peer-reviewed papers included in this study.

EC3 [PROJ] The project is seemingly dead (i.e., no updates

or existing systems that use it).

There are possible limitations to our research methodol-

ogy, e.g it is rather subjective what qualiﬁes as minimal de-

scription and there is high possibility that an existing project

does not have enough traction to show up on our radar. We

however feel that with our approach we have gathered the

critical mass of the existing work, both in industry and the

scientiﬁc community, on blockhains in supply chains, that

allows as to perform a well-founded analysis of the subject

from multiple perspectives.

IV. ANALYSIS

In this section we analyse the selected articles on the axes

of the research questions posed earlier. Before we delve

into the analysis, we underline the following observation:

Although in the last three or four years there has been an

explosion of interest in the application of distributed ledger

technologies in supply chains, and an increasing number of

relevant researches are published every year (Fig. 2), the vast

majority of this literature coming from the academic world

either takes a purely conceptual approach, without analyzing

the details and performance of such a system, or discusses the

different aspects of coupling blockchains with supply chains

from philosophical, industrial or/and ﬁnancial points of view.

Only a few academic works detail their proposed blockchain-

based system and implementation and the majority of use

cases and implementation articles are coming as white papers

or experience write-ups from the industry. As we explained

in Section III, we include such articles and white papers as

we deem necessary for the completion of this survey.

We use this observation in order to cluster the collection of

works in a way that will assist us in better analysing them and

discussing the research points RQ1-RQ6. Based on this, we

can make a high level distinction of the literature into (G1)

works that take a theoretical and less technical approach and

(G2) academic and industrial works that include use cases

and implemented blockchain systems for supply chains. G1

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can be further subdivided into categories based on the the-

matic taken in each article whereas the systemic works of G2

are subdivided into academic and industrial applications. A

summary of these subdivisions is presented in Table 1.

From this table, we notice that blockchain-based use cases

and system proposals for supply chains, both from groups G1

and G2, compose the bulk of the reviewed literature. That

should not come as a surprise, since, as we have outlined

already in the introduction, the technology offers a number of

properties automatically (or by design) that ﬁnd immediate

application and improve the management of a supply chain

(for example, the traceability property). This applicability is

apparent across multiple industries, from food industry and

pharmaceuticals to manufacturing and insurance services.

In Table 2, we summarize the industries that have adopted

blockchain technology for instances or parts of their supply

chains. We divide the found use cases into two categories,

namely the theoretical papers (including works from subdivi-

sions G1A and G1B) and implementation papers (including

works from subdivisions G2A and G2B). From this table we

conclude that, although there are a few industrial applications

where the blockchain adaptation seems to gain some signiﬁ-

cant ground, the technology has potential and can beneﬁt the

management of supply chains across many and diverse indus-

tries and services, either by providing theoretical discussions

on the subject, or by proposing a blockchain-based system.

A. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED CONCEPTUAL SYSTEMS AND

USE CASES (G1A & G1B)

The scientiﬁc world has shown a lot of interest in

the blockchain technology and its application to supply

chains [20]–[33]. None of these works, however, provide any

technical details about their proposed system, nor address

the characteristics and development issues of integrating

blockchains and other technological tools (such as sensors,

RFID tags, IoT conﬁgurations etc.) in supply chains, and

use those as black boxes. This seems to be, nevertheless, a

dominating research approach when it comes to asking the

question “How can a blockchain system be applied on a

supply chain?”.

In particular, some works [22], [25], [27]–[32] identify and

discuss the different types of agents (or roles) at the different

stages of a supply chain; such roles are physical entities

or organizations/companies that can register or/and access

information in the system. In the real life of a company, these

agents can count in the dozens, creating a large and complex

network of co-operations, dependencies, transactions and

supplies. The majority of the existing scientiﬁc/conceptual

works, however, take a rather abstract approach, where they

only consider a handful of roles - namely those of the

end consumers, the retailers, the suppliers etc., - in order

to showcase the applicability of blockchains. From this we

conclude that, although these approaches are too simplistic to

realistically assist any company appreciate the beneﬁts com-

ing from adopting a distributed ledger technology for their

supply chain, they do identify that most supply chains have

a large portion of common and overlapping roles, actions

and functionalities that can be implemented on a blockchain

along with the use of some tool, such as RFID tags. A more

technical approach is taken in the work of Leng et al. [33],

where the focus of the paper is to propose a double chain

architecture, where the activities of the different roles are

divided between two chains.

The use cases discussed on a conceptual level [20]–[27]

are application scenarios of supply chain examples where

proposed frameworks or abstracted ideas of blockchain con-

ﬁgurations could be applied. Usually, these use cases don’t

describe the complete network of a supply chain, rather they

focus on a small branch of it, in order to showcase the ap-

plicability of the technology. For example in [22], the ready

manufacturing concept uses as an example a short branch

in the production of card-boxes, where the different stages

of the process are identiﬁed (such as forestry, paper man-

ufacturing, waste management etc) and the various actions

between these stages are discussed in terms of the blockchain

technology. In [27], a use case in textile industry is sketched

and the various stages of processing yarn to creating and

selling clothes are discussed in terms of integration in a

blockchain. Following a similar approach, in [25] the authors

sketch the process of acquiring and assembling parts for air-

crafts on a blockchain.

In some cases, the actual supply chain and its integration

on the blockchain is not even discussed; rather, a more

philosophical approach is taken. For example, in [24], the

authors consider the application of the blockchain in a chain

of businesses (B2B supply chain) and discuss the beneﬁts of

applying the technology in this particular use case. In [21],

the authors discuss the potential of applying blockchain

technology for greening supply chains, and identify a num-

ber of use cases where this application could be beneﬁcial,

from vendor and supplier selection, to purchasing, material

management, marketing, waste management and eco-design

systems.

In [20], [23], [26], the authors review various use cases of

supply chains and critically investigate the impact of integrat-

ing blockchain and other technologies. In particular, in [26],

the authors review use cases of blockchain technology in food

supply chains, they identify the various agents and stages of

the process that could be integrated in the technology and re-

view relevant implementations or examples of the real world

(we discuss those in Section IV-B). In [20], authors present

four use cases - namely paperwork processing, fraud, origin

tracking and IoT operation - where the use of blockchain

technology could contribute to improving them. The work

focuses mainly in capturing the perspective of manufacturers

and industry partners in the application of the technology

to each of these four use cases. Finally, in [23], the authors

review four use cases in the dairy food industry and through

a number of interviews with industry partners, they identify

boundary conditions that need to be met before blockchains

can be successfully applied. The key boundary conditions

found are related to the standardization of traceability pro-

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Group Subdivision (code) Papers

G1 Conceptual use cases (G1A) [20]–[27]

Conceptual system proposals (G1B) [22], [25], [27]–[33]

Adoption Requirements & Challenges (G1C) [20], [22]–[24], [26], [34]–[36]

User Perspective (G1D) [37], [38]

Adoption Facilitators & Beneﬁts (G1E) [20], [21], [24], [26], [27]

G2 Academic applications & use cases (G2A) [15], [39]–[45]

Industrial applications & use cases (G2B) [46]–[69]

TABLE 1. Thematic categories identiﬁed in the body of reviewed papers

Supply chain type Conceptual Papers Implementation Papers

Aviation Parts [25] -

Businesses [24] -

Carboxes [22] -

Clothes & Textiles [27], [29] -

Diamonds / art / valuables - [49]

Drugs & Pharmaceuticals - [50], [52], [61], [68]

Food & Agriculture [23], [26], [30], [33], [35] [42], [45], [48]

Generic or not mentioned [31], [32], [54] [15], [41], [43], [44], [47], [51], [53], [56], [69]

Insurance - [60]

Laptop Parts [28] -

Manufacturing - [63]

Shipping & Transportation - [40], [46], [58], [59], [62], [64]–[67]

Trade ﬁnance - [57]

Wood - [39]

TABLE 2. Types of supply chains discussed in the reviewed literature.

cesses, quality requirements and compliance among all par-

ties involved with the supply chain (we discuss those and

other challenges in more detail in the following paragraphs).

B. APPLICATIONS AND USE CASES FROM INDUSTRY

AND ACADEMIA (G2A & G2B)

There is a clear distinction between the implemented ap-

plications coming from academia and those coming from

industry. On the one hand, the academic literature [15], [39]–

[45] focuses on clearly deﬁning the problems arising in the

supply chain, then proposing a blockchain-based solution

that addresses those requirements. On the other hand, most

of the resources found regarding industry applications [46]–

[69] have the ambition to make a strong case for sales, or

simply announce the incorporation of blockchain technology

by some company. Most commonly, they don’t disclose the

details of the system, and only a few aspire to build open

ecosystems around open sourced protocols. On top of this,

the industrial approaches put signiﬁcant emphasis on making

the design adoptable, compatible with current IT solutions

and ﬁnancially feasible across all applications.

In both approaches, nevertheless, there are certain prop-

erties of the blockchain technology, or opportunities - such

as traceability, anti-fraud, trust management, transparency

and IoT integration - around which the practitioners and

researchers base their adoption of the technology to a supply

chain and focus the description of their system.

Traceability/Provenance The most frequent use case for

blockchain technology is undeniably the traceability of the

product life-cycle throughout the supply chain. This is ap-

parent across all industries, but is especially important in the

food sector. In the case of Walmart [48], the transparency

of the supply chain is not only a major way of preventing

food-borne illness outbreaks, but also a tool to satisfy the in-

creasing awareness around provable food quality, sustainabil-

ity and fair trade. Similarly in medicine, PharmaTrace [68]

claims to bring a combination of R&D knowledge sharing

and auditable supply chain management solution to the same

platform. Mediledger [50] provides a product veriﬁcation

system fulﬁlling the Drug Supply Chain Security Act in the

US. It states that all prescription medicine returned to distrib-

utors must have their unique product identiﬁers veriﬁed with

the manufacturer before being resold. Modum’s [52] product

aims to comply with the Good Distribution Practice (GDP)

regulation’s requirement of a proof that shipped medicinal

products have not been exposed to conditions compromising

their safety. This is currently done via expensive temperature-

controlled vehicles, but Modum supplies a portable device

that can feed measurements throughout transportation. The

data is stored on the device until the receiver transfers it to

their phone via Bluetooth, then registers it on the blockchain.

In the shipping industry, probably the most recognized

blockchain solution is TradeLens [46], the result of a collab-

oration between IBM and Maersk. It is advertised as an open

initiative to solve the lack of collaboration between different

stakeholders involved in the journey of a shipment, providing

a foundation of trust and breaking down information silos.

It traces products from the time they are loaded onto a

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container until they arrive to the customer, registering various

shipping events from numerous parties. OpenPort [62] and

ShipChain [59] provide a similar solution, with the latter

also incorporating a geofencing functionality. Wu et al. [40]

aims to achieve near real-time visibility during the physical

distribution of the products in the supply chain. These are

usually tracked by a single source - the carrier - but there

is often no information for the other stakeholders, and when

there is, it cannot be validated by an independent party. In the

transportation sector Helo et al. [15] propose a blockchain

based logistics monitoring system for parcel tracking.

With the exception of Figorilli et al. [39] - who proposed a

system tracking down wood from its tree form in the forest to

the end product via QR codes and RFID tags as anchors - the

rest of the applications in this category intend to stay industry

agnostic, serving as a more generic solution. SmartLog [69],

Ambrosus [54], PeerLedger [56], OriginTrail [47] and Prove-

nance [70] share the goal of offering a universal platform

applicable to various industries from food through mining

to automotive. The latter also makes a case for transparency

being a competitive advantage by recording the journey of

products along their lifetime.

Transparency and counterfeit prevention Transparency

goes hand in hand with anti-fraud and counterfeit prevention.

Some projects –like Guardtime HSX [61] in pharma, and

Everledger [49] that started off tracking the digital twin of

each diamond contributing to higher conﬁdence in purchas-

ing and selling such products – put heavy emphasis on these

activities. Everledger has recently expanded to gemstones,

minerals, insurance, luxury, art and wines. Toyoda et al. [41]

describe a novel framework for post-supply chains in order

to prove possession of a product. The goal is to give the

customer the ability to reject the purchase of counterfeits

even with genuine RFID tag information if the seller cannot

prove the ownership.

Trust management In some use cases, the focus is to achieve

an accessible, trusted single source of truth across different

stakeholders. A good example for this would be Insurwave

[60], the joint project of Guardtime3and EY4. It automates

the insurance process to meet the needs of the digital age

with managing dynamic risk. Other applications are also

aiming to automate the manual paperwork. CargoX [58] and

CargoCoin [64] are heavily invested in digitizing the bills

of lading documents, which are one of the main sources of

inefﬁciency in modern shipping administration. On top of

this, Skuchain [51] also offers the Empowered Collaborative

Commerce Cloud (EC3) that claims to be the Swiss army

knife of supply chain software. Providing a broad range of

solutions – such as inventory tracking (the transformation

of sub-assemblies, parts and raw materials used to make

a ﬁnished product), digitizing invoices and other currently

physical documentation. Morpheus.Network [57] approaches

the technology from the trade ﬁnance perspective. They built

3https://guardtime.com/portfolio

4https://www.ey.com/en_gl/blockchain

a platform that allows rapid payment and conversion of funds

through various partnerships at real world exchange rates,

while incorporating a single network fee. It integrates with

payment (SWIFT, Ripple, Stellar), transportation (FedEx,

UPS) and CRM services (Salesforce). SyncFab [63] aims

to use idling machines and connect available manufacturing

capacity with production demand. The Fr8 network [65] con-

nects carriers and brokers improving shipment coordination

and management, adding tracking utilities. NextPakk [66]

attempts to solve the last-mile logistics problem through the

shared economy model similar to what Uber introduced to

the taxi world.

Blockchain and IoT More and more researchers and practi-

tioners realize how IoT and blockchain technology comple-

ment each other. In one example, Caro et al. [42] propose

a traceability solution in the agri-food sector integrating IoT

devices feeding onto and consuming from the chain. Simi-

larly, Riddle & Code [53] offer - among many other products

- NFC tagging then blockchain enrolling. A recurring theme

in the literature is that the data on chain is as good as the data

recorded. RFID tags and QR codes are notoriously unreliable

trust anchors, and this is what Waltonchain [55] strives to

ﬁx. They developed a secure two-way authentication RFID

design - with integrated encryption logic - that they claim

to be tamper proof. The sensor itself can act like a node,

and directly upload to the chain, making IoT measurements

(temperature, humidity etc.) signiﬁcantly safer. Machine-

chain communication is also what SKYFChain [67] focuses

on, creating a platform between unmanned autonomous ve-

hicles and businesses. Finally, Malik et al. [44] argues that

blockchain alone cannot support the trust and reliability

of data stored on chain regarding the quality of physical

commodities and the trustworthiness of supply chain entities.

They aim to provide an automated framework to associate a

trust value to each supply chain event based on the trust value

of the participant and the quality of the commodity.

1) Design Decisions

A popular approach in incorporating distributed ledger tech-

nology in the supply chain is to build on top of an established

blockchain platform. Even though the argument behind the

choice of a speciﬁc implementation is usually not discussed

in detail by the resources examined, the different use cases

will be reviewed around recurring patterns in design deci-

sions. The platform choice, very often, dictates by design

the permission rights of the used blockchain system. For

example, the systems implemented on the Hyperledger Fab-

ric are primarily private, in the sense that only parties with

granted permission can enter and audit data on the chain.

Although such system design choices are counterintuitive for

a blockchain technology, they allow the different partners

involved in a supply chain to comply with agreed rules,

establish transparency in their transactions and increase a

sense of trust among them for their businesses. Public, or

permissionless, systems, on the other hand, permit every

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Platform

Conﬁguration Ethereum Hyperledger Fabric Platform Agnostic Stellar Unspeciﬁed

Permissioned [50] [43], [44], [46], [48], [49], [56], [67], [69] [51] - [70]

Permissionless [15], [39], [59] - [47] - -

Hybrid [41], [54] - - - [40]

Unspeciﬁed [57], [58], [62]–[64] [68] [42], [45], [52], [55], [60], [61], [65] [66] [53]

TABLE 3. Platforms and permission rights for the implemented applications and use cases (Group G1)

entity, either it is part of the supply chain or not, to interact

with the blockchain entries. In the middle of these two design

choices, some applications choose a hybrid system, where the

data entry part is private to the partners involved in the supply

chain interactions whereas all data and information on the

chain is then available for auditing by the greater public. We

summarize these choices in Table 3.

Hyperledger Fabric and Permissioned systems Supply

chains involve high volume of commercially sensitive data

of different stakeholders. [71] argues that permissionless

blockchains are unlikely to become a good basis of GDPR

compliant systems. They discuss several ways of incorporat-

ing privacy, out of which the two most frequently used are

the recording of off-chain data hashes and role based access

control – the latter being the major reason why permissioned

ledgers gained popularity in the commercial scene. The

widespread implementation Hyperledger Fabric is used by

various industries from tracking food [48] to diamonds [49].

Fabric has two main features supporting the storage of data

privately, both of which being extensively used by TradeLens

[46]. Firstly, channels provide a separation between different

ocean carriers, while authorities and other stakeholders can

join multiple channels. Secondly access control lists (ACL)

add granular data access rights based on the role of the

speciﬁc participant in the system. Also built on Hyperledger

Fabric, [44] propose an additional so called reputation and

trust module to the supply chain. It updates trust proﬁles of

supply chain entities and commodities upon each chain event

across their lifetime.

Ethereum and Permissionless systems Multiple projects

opted to develop on the Ethereum network. [15] presents a

popular architecture with the clear separation of blockchain

and application layers. The client is connected to a web

service that is responsible for caching transactions, for per-

forming queries and maintaining an up to date state of the

distributed ledger. It is connected to local Geth5node, which

serves as a bridge between the application and the rest of

the nodes. Some projects [57], [58], [62]–[64] take an extra

step in the integration with Ethereum, and offer an ERC-20 /

ERC-223 compatible token, that is not only useful for value

transfer, but also for covering transaction costs on the public

blockchain. [41] argues that a purely permissionless system

is incapable of preventing counterfeiters to impersonate any

company. They claim it requires a centralized, trusted third

party to enroll a manufacturer, resulting in a hybrid approach

5https://geth.ethereum.org/

regarding the openness of the system. Others integrate with

cloud services in order to solve the off-chain data storage, e.g

[39] runs on the Azure Blockchain Workbench, while [46] is

backed by IBM cloud services.

Blockchain agnostic systems With the rapid development

of distributed ledger technologies, some projects [42], [52],

[60] decided to remain blockchain agnostic. Staying ag-

nostic brings the advantage of avoiding vendor lock-in,

the possibility to upgrade to a better implementation, and

the ﬂexibility to integrate with multiple networks in the

fragmented landscape of distributed ledger technologies.

Skuchain [51] claims to achieve reliable access control on

various blockchains, from Hyperledger Fabric to Ethereum or

Corda. Ambrosus [54] built their own protocol on Ethereum

and IPFS, with an ERC-20 token AMBER. The tokens are

so called data-bonded, meaning that they are reserved with

each batch of products and follow them along the produc-

tion chain. They split and merge with the materials and

components until they reach the end of the supply chain.

End customers can claim these tokens which incentivizes

the purchase of Ambrosus tracked products and tokens to be

recycled. They claim initially all data is private, and no entity

can view these records. However it can be shared with differ-

ent peers, or can be made public for all users of the AMB-

NET network. OriginTrail [47] states that there is no stan-

dalone decentralized solution - distributed ﬁle storage (IPFS),

distributed database (BigchainDB), blockchains (Ethereum,

IOTA) - suitable for interconnected supply chains at the time

of writing. At least not one that satisﬁes the performance,

scalability, cost-effectiveness and trust requirements. They

propose creating a distributed network of entities, where

the dynamic data of transactions are stored off-chain on the

different stakeholders’ own servers. When they transact, they

agree on the dynamic content via zero knowledge proofs.

External auditors can also participate in this agreement and

provide their own conﬁrmation. Then the conﬁrmed transac-

tion’s hash is stored on the blockchain, for data integrity. The

network and the protocol stays the same regardless which

implementation is integrated. For storage they use graph

databases and replicate parts of the graph across different so-

called data holders, increasing resiliency against single point

of failure. The data storage, the consensus and replication

checks consume processing power, thus participation needs

to be incentivized by introducing a token to the system.

Multi-chain architectures Another way of tackling the scal-

ability and privacy challenges is to utilize multi-chain archi-

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tectures. [40] creates private sub-ledgers for each shipment

involving the trading partners. They are connected via a

public ledger containing the private event hashes as well

as tracking information of all trucks associated. ShipChain

[59] follows a similar approach, incorporating a side chain

that stores transport information as encrypted, owner con-

trolled data. SKYFChain [67] has a three layered architec-

ture. A permissioned ledger (Hyperledger Fabric) operates

as a top level trusted environment storing platform related

data (i.e, device, licensing, operator, authority and ﬁnancial).

The secondary network runs on the Ethereum platform with

an ERC-20 compatible token, while the tertiary network

is necessary to store and process device telemetry and in-

ﬂight information. Scalability and privacy are not the only

concern when working with distributed ledgers. [43], in order

to overcome the latency issues of current Proof of Work

based blockchains, it applies a two step block generation

approach. It maintains two ledgers, one for storing actual

supply chain records, and one for reserving the blocks neces-

sary for it. By doing this, they shift the latency of adding

a new block to the reservation process. Waltonchain [55]

brought customization one step further. In their setup the

parent chain is a mod of Ethereum with a new consensus

protocol called Proof of Contribution. It connects different

child chains (e.g Ethereum or Hyperledger Fabric) creating

inter-ledger consensus and making it possible to work across

chains. They claim theoretically endless scalability, since the

number of child chain hierarchies are not limited. While the

main net is a public chain open to everyone, child chains are

implemented according to industry requirements, and are not

necessarily public. Their development depends on the desires

of the data rights’ holders.

Solution scope The majority of the listed projects is aiming

to only extend the current supply chain technology and not

to replace the entire software stack. The common idea is

to provide a shared platform bridging isolated data silos.

The main difference is on what abstraction level the con-

nection happens. For example, the TradeLens platform [46]

does not directly comply to any current system’s interface,

but provides an open API that can be easily integrated by

implementing a connector for the already in-use modern

supply chain management software. Others [50], [51], [56]

aim to directly extend current ERP solutions, adding just

an additional layer on top in order to join the network.

Waltonchain [55] takes this idea one step further, and bridges

different blockchain platforms to create a shared indexing

framework where blocks can refer to any other blocks in

the system. Some projects also extend the platform with user

facing web or mobile clients to provide a fully ﬂedged end-to-

end solution. This usually requires some sort of application

service, as described in [15].

There are a few use cases that are not attempting to ship

a widely scoped product for the entire supply chain but

focus on one element of it. [44] proposes the previously

mentioned trust framework that is in theory applicable to

various blockchain implementations. Gao et al’s two-step

block generation protocol [43] aims to solve latency is-

sues speciﬁc to recent blockchain implementations. Multiple

projects have also developed hardware products. Modum [52]

built a temperature measurement device that operates ofﬂine

and syncs up to a blockchain network when the transportation

is complete. Waltonchain [55] developed a technology which

claims to make RFIDs tamper proof.

Project scope Papers

End-to-end software [15], [39], [46], [51], [52], [54], [57]–[59],

[62]–[65], [65], [66]

Platform [40], [41], [47], [50], [55], [56], [69], [70]

Concept technology [43], [44]

Unknown [42], [45], [48], [49], [60], [67], [68]

TABLE 4. Scope of blockchain projects in supply chain.

State of the projects Most of the use cases we encountered

in the academic literature are proof of concept works that

have been tested in lab, ranking those as non-mature use

cases. Some of these works often disclose a performance

metric based on which they run their lab tests. For instance,

in [40] the authors identify scaling issues caused by block

collisions and forks. In another instance, [41] analyzes gas

costs required by every transaction. Even though the gas

price increases with each transaction, it stays under 1 USD

for six transactions, which is deemed tolerable for medium

priced items. The benchmarks proposed in [42] result in

Sawtooth outperforming Ethereum in all measured metrics.

It is also noted that Ethereum’s Proof of Work does not go

well with low power IoT devices and edge gateways. In [44],

the authors note that the extra layer of computing reputation

for different parties adds a minimal overhead to each event,

which affects the latency signiﬁcantly when transaction rate

is approaching 100 tps. An increase of the chain throughput

by means of decreasing the latency of the block generation

is addressed in [43]. Since the block reservation step is not

considered in the test measurements, the authors claim to

achieve higher throughput than other PoW chains with 40

transactions per second for 100 nodes.

Adoption of new technologies in the industry usually starts

with a pilot project involving only a fragment of the complete

set of stakeholders. Chronicled [50] is ﬁnishing Mediledger’s

ﬁrst pilot as of writing, with over 25 companies. They report

having a sub 300 ms lookup time among geographically

diverse nodes within the network. If the item is not found in

the system, it connects to external validation providers with

increased response time of around one second.

Finally, there are several companies utilizing distributed

ledger technology in production. From this pool of initiatives,

one that distinguishes itself as the most mature implemen-

tation, is the IBM projects in collaboration with Walmart

and Maersk. Walmart’s [48] food traceability endeavor ﬁrst

piloted in 2017, and is in production since 2018. They claim

to reduce 7 days of back-tracing the source to approx 2

seconds. TradeLens [46] now involve the four largest global

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carriers. They claim the system handles 10M events and 100k

documents each week.

Project maturity Papers

Production [46]–[48], [51], [52], [55]–[59], [62], [70]

Pilot [39], [50], [54], [55], [60], [69]

Proof of Concept [15], [40]–[45], [63]–[68]

TABLE 5. Maturity of blockchain projects in supply chain.

C. ADOPTION REQUIREMENTS AND CHALLENGES

(G1C)

It is undoubtedly a long and uncertain process the adoption

of a new technology in the industrial and ﬁnancial world.

No matter the nature of the organization, such entities are

creatures of habit, and attempting to learn an old dog new

tricks takes signiﬁcant effort. Likewise, for the industrial

world to change their current status quo for their supply

chain implementation, signiﬁcant effort needs to be made

for the necessary requirements to be met and the adoption

difﬁculties to be addressed and overcome. Thankfully, this

issue is tackled in more and more works that are considering

the application of blockchains in supply chains [20], [22],

[23], [26], [34].

The adoption challenges discussed in these works can be

divided in two categories: those that are technical and native

to the limitations caused by the current state of the blockchain

technology, and those that are related to the industry perspec-

tive and policy making (Table 6).

With regards to the technical challenges and requirements,

a key issue is data security and user privacy. This, along with

the limitations of IT infrastructure, especially for small and

medium enterprises, are the main technical reasons causing

reluctance among industry partners and making them hes-

itant in applying blockchain technology to their use cases.

Speciﬁc to the integration of supply chains, mainly between

businesses, the authors in [24], are investigating the function-

alities and requirements of their potential blockchain-based

systems. They point out the inefﬁciency of the current status

quo among businesses and banks and how most of the ex-

pected requirements and functionalities for their transactions

and supply chains, are already offered by the blockchain

technology, at lower costs and faster speeds.

Another main issue is the known scalability problem of

blockchains, which limits the amount of transactions and in-

formation that can be stored and processed in a short amount

of time, with the current available infrastructure. Given that

most industries form part of large and complex networks, the

current state of the blockchain technology creates uncertainty

with regards to the size and complexity of use cases that can

be currently implemented. However, as we discussed in the

previous section, real-world attempts to adopt the technology

in the industrial world (e.g., [46], [48]) are working towards

faster transactions and higher throughput. In [22], the need

for in system implementation of the smart contracts and the

constant updates of the digital proﬁles, have been identiﬁed

as technical issues that impede the application of blockchains

in manufacturing supply chains. A key issue, especially in the

food industry, is the linkage between a physical product and

its digital record [34] and the technological tools that can help

overcome this problem (such as paired RFID tags).

Moving to barriers and requirements from the perspective

of the industry partners and policy making, one of the key

issues is the reluctance from the industry and ﬁnance parties

to adopt the technology, partly due to the technical limitations

we sketched in the previous paragraph and partly due to

the declining reputation of the technology which is linked

to cryptocurrencies. Because of the distributed nature of

the technology, its success heavily depends on compliance

and general agreement between the different parties involved

with the supply chain. More than often, this implies a heavy

dependence on blockchain operators, as well, and a strong

requirement of trust between the different parties and be-

tween the industry and the technology itself. Even though,

from a scientiﬁc point of view, such issues are reasonable

requirements rather than challenges, it is understandable that

the industry and ﬁnancial sector are concerned with all these

dependencies.

Lack of regulations, unclear beneﬁts as well as the com-

munication barriers between technical experts and policy

makers are key issues that do not facilitate the adoption of

the technology. Signiﬁcant barriers exist because of the lack

of sufﬁcient educational and training platforms, for non tech-

nical experts to familiarize themselves with the operations

and beneﬁts of blockchains, as well as because of the digital

divide between developed and developing worlds, where al-

ready different standards exist in most aspects of modern life.

In the intersection of technical and non technical barriers,

we highlight that the lack of standardization of traceability

and certiﬁcation processes as well as of quality requirements,

in the digital world, coupled with the aforementioned lack

of regulations and related policies, are stressful barriers that

slow down the acceptance and adoption of blockchains in

supply chain instances.

D. USER PERSPECTIVE (G1D)

A different approach is taken in works such as [37], [38],

where the perspective of the users is sketched. In [37], the

authors use the Uniﬁed Theory of Acceptance and Use of

Technology (UTAUT) to assess the acceptance of users of

blockchain technologies in supply chain traceability appli-

cations, and ﬁnd that this depends on the technology’s per-

formance expectancy, the expectations regarding the users’

own efforts, the facilitating conditions, the social inﬂuence

as well as the users’ own behavioural intention. In [38], after

surveying about 180 practitioners of the supply chains in

India, additional concerns were found regarding discomfort

about understanding and learning how to use the blockchain

technology, insecurity in terms of the transactions and the

different parties of the network that have access to it, the

users’ perceived (non) ease of use (obviously stemming from

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Technical Data security & Privacy Issues [20], [24], [26], [36]

Lack of technical maturity [20], [22], [24], [26]

Flexibility in design decision for complicated supply chains [26], [34], [36]

Storage & Latency of transactions [26], [34]

Performance capability [22], [26]

Digital Integration [24], [36]

Link between physical product and digital record [34]

In system implementation of smart contracts [22]

Constant updates of digital proﬁles [22]

Industry & Policy making Reluctance from industry and ﬁnance partners [20], [22], [26]

Compliance between different parties [20], [34], [35]

Lack of regulations [20], [26]

Lack of understanding between policy makers and technical experts [24], [26]

Standardization of quality requirements [23], [26]

Unclear beneﬁts [20]

Dependance on blockchain operators [20]

Standardization of traceability processes [23]

Limited educational and training platforms [26]

Digital divide between developed & developing countries [26]

TABLE 6. Summary of adoption challenges

the lack of education) and how useful they consider the tech-

nology (again, due to limited information on the subject and

declining reputation of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies).

E. ADOPTION FACILITATORS AND BENEFITS (G1E)

The adoption of blockchain technology in supply chains has

a number of beneﬁts, summarized next. Two very important,

well-known and obvious beneﬁts concern the ease of man-

aging the vast amount of paperwork and tracing of products

origins offered by the automated and transparent nature of

the technology (we remind the reader here the increased

throughput and improvement in transactions in the case of

TradeLens [46]). Beyond these two advantages, the authors

in [20] discuss how the technology can assist in identifying

fraud cases and counterfeit products, but also the facilitation

of using the Internet of Things, by allowing the connection

of sensors and digital devices that take part in the various

stages of a supply chain. The technological beneﬁts of the

integration are well discussed in [24], highlighting the track

of changes on the chain, the interoperability of the systems,

the monitoring and control of the various services along the

chain, cloud security and secure real time connectivity, real

time sharing of information with partners, control of user

identiﬁcation etc. We include all these under the umbrella

term “Beneﬁts stemming from blockchain functionalities”, in

our summary of beneﬁts:

•Beneﬁts stemming from blockchain functionalities

•Consumer awareness

•Decrease of paperwork processing cost and time

•Facilitate IoT

•Facilitation of transactions in developing countries

•Fairer pricing

•Identify fraud and counterfeit cases

•Platform for emission reduction

•Support and Insurance to SMEs

•Tracing product origins

•Waste management

A number of conceptual papers are proposing systems,

discuss use cases or address issues regarding the adoption of

blockchains in supply chains with a focus on assessing one or

more blockchain properties and functionalities. Apart from

the already mentioned ones, in Table 7 we summarize what

are the properties and functionalities most researches focus

their assessment on. The possibility to trace the products,

especially food, and the quality management from the pro-

duction of the items to their delivery, storage and sale, are the

key properties that encourage the adoption of the technology

in supply chains. The potential to publish all information

regarding the products, their production processes etc. both

between the parties involved in the different stages of the

supply chain, but also between the industry partners and the

consumers, has the power to create a secure and comfortable

relationship between consumers, producers and manufactur-

ers. Blockchain technology allows for different types of trust

to be satisﬁed. Fraud and counterfeit cases can be detected,

any attempts to temper with the ledger can be identiﬁed and

all transactions are transparent, by default. The case of double

marginalization is also discussed in literature as one of the

key reasons that blockchains can improve manufacturing

supply chains.

Property Papers

Quality Management [25], [28], [30], [31], [35]

Traceability [23], [30], [31], [35], [37]

Information Sharing [28], [32]

Trust [35]

Transaction Transparency [36]

Double Marginalization [32]

TABLE 7. Blockchain properties and funcionalities that supply chains can

take advantage from

A number of additional adoption opportunities and ben-

eﬁts are outlined in [26], including: (i) public access and

VOLUME 4, 2016 11

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control of the supply chain, as well as the reduction of the

cost of maintenance of the current supply chains, can lead

to fairer prices of products across the market, (ii) small

enterprises, farmers and producers will feel more secure

and well supported, (iii) facilitation of transactions and fair

trading in developing countries.

Finally, a couple of works are considering the environmen-

tal beneﬁts of the technology, such as waste management.

In [21], the authors discuss opportunities for greening supply

chains and enumerate the various use cases that facilitate it.

In [27], the decrease of carbon emissions are considered as

one of the goals for using blockchain technology for a textile

supply chain.

V. DISCUSSION

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. Those are highlighted as well in Table 8.

RQ16From the papers we mined for our review, we conclude

that the existing literature (with the broader sense of the term,

in order to include project descriptions) 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).

Although it is undoubtedly necessary to conduct abstract

analyses of new technologies and their applications in real

life scenarios, there is an obvious lack in technical works

on the subject. That is either because the industries applying

the technologies are being silent with regards to the technical

details, or because the scientiﬁc community researching the

subject is mainly coming from the business and ﬁnancial

sector and have limited interest or knowledge on the technical

details of the system.

RQ27As shown in Tables 2 and 9, distributed ledgers can

be applied to a large variety of industrial supply chains but

also to business-to-business networks. In terms of industrial

supply chains, the food, pharmaceutical and shipment sectors

are the dominating use cases. The reason for this is twofold:

ﬁrstly, it is the sensitivity of the products that requires ad-

vanced and secure means of production and transfer and

secondly, blockchain technology facilitates the traceability of

the products, which is even more vital nowadays for edible

products, due to the increased attempts of fraud.

RQ38There are nowadays tenths of use cases or imple-

6What are the existing research approaches on the subject of blockchains

for supply chains?

7What type of supply chains can be implemented on a distributed ledger?

8What are the existing blockchain-based supply chain implemented sys-

tems? What are their design choices and technical characteristics?

mented blockchain-based systems in industry to learn from,

although only a part of them have published their technical

choices and implementations. As discussed in our analysis

and shown in Tables 3, 4, 5 and 9, many implemented

systems utilise the Ethereum or Hyperledger Fabric platforms

for their systems, however a large number chooses to be plat-

form agnostic so that multiple and various technologies can

be incorporated in the system. In terms of permission rights,

most implementations leave that technical detail unspeciﬁed,

even though it is a crucial one. We next found that most

implemented systems use the blockchain technology for an

end-to-end implementation of their supply chain. Another

promising ﬁnding is that, although there are many works

at the level of proof of concept, the number of systems at

production stage are not negligible – here we should again

highlight that the actual number of implemented systems is

larger than the reviewed one, due to the large number of

industries that do not share their technical details and are

therefore excluded from studies such as ours.

RQ49The beneﬁts from adopting distributed ledger tech-

nologies to supply chains are various and numerous, as dis-

cussed in our analysis and summarized in Subsection IV-E.

The beneﬁts span from decreasing management and trans-

actional costs, to tracing fast and accurately frauds and

counterfeit cases and from supporting and insuring SMEs to

environmental beneﬁts.

RQ510 The adoption challenges and limitations of the tech-

nology, at the current state, as they result from our analysis,

are shown in Table 6. As we show there, those belong to

two categories, the technical ones and the ones coming from

the industry and policy making. We feel that in either case,

such challenges should not be received by the research and

industrial communities as obstacles, rather as opportunities

to improve the technology (by solving the scalability problem

for example, irrespective of the application of the blockchain

technology) and to standardise procedures and increase edu-

cation and awareness to a broader audience. Such awareness

need not be just technical but also to increase understanding

of business procedures, policy making and the opportunities

offered in the new digital era.

RQ611 Incorporating new technologies is one of the modern

ways used by companies and organizations to increase both

their capital and their popularity. The blockchain technology,

for reasons highlighted in this document, has gained a lot of

attention in this respect, as its properties and innate character-

istics ﬁnd direct application to manufacturing supply chains.

From the analysis presented in this survey, we sketched

a number of issues that are yet to be solved. We group

such issues in two categories: ﬁrstly, technical limitations

of the distributed ledger technologies (and especially of the

blockchain) that need to be addressed irrespective of the ap-

9What are the beneﬁts from the adoption of blockchain technology on

supply chains?

10What are the challenges to be addressed?

11What are the current research gaps and open problems?

12 VOLUME 4, 2016

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Research Questions Key ﬁndings

RQ1: Existing research approaches (a) Theoretical analyses (20%)

(b) Conceptual systems for case studies (38%)

Observation : there is obvious shortage of comprehensive technical works on the subject

RQ2: Types of supply chains Variety of industrial supply chains (e.g., food, pharmaceuticals, shipment) and business-

to-business networks

See Tables 2 and 9

RQ3: Existing implemented systems

and their design choices

Proof of Concept (42%) Production (38%) Pilot (19%)

Ethereum platform (33%) Hyperledger Fabric (27%) Agnostic (27%)

Unspeciﬁed permission rights (45%) Permissioned (33%) Permissionless (12%)

See Tables 3, 4, 5 and 9

RQ4: Adoption beneﬁts Blockchain functionalities Consumer awareness

Facilitate IoT Fairer pricing

Identify fraud and counterfeit cases Tracing product origins

Platform for emission reduction Waste management

Support and Insurance to SMEs

Decrease of paperwork processing cost and time

Facilitation of transactions in developing countries

RQ5: Challenges to be addressed (a) Technical challenges (e.g., blockchain scalability issue)

(b) Industry and policy making (e.g., procedure standardization)

See Table 6

RQ6: Open problems (a) Technical limitations of distributed ledger technologies:

- Scalability issue

- Interoperability between various platforms

- Integration of IoT

- Immutability and control of off-the-chain tasks

(b) Digitalization of supply chains:

- Formulation of regulations and policies

- Link between physical and digital product

- Standardization of traceability and quality certiﬁcation

TABLE 8. Summary of the key ﬁndings to the research questions RQ1-RQ6

plication of the technology and secondly, issues arising from

the digitalization of supply chains and their implementation

on a distributed ledger. These issues are potential research

directions so that the ﬁeld can advance signiﬁcantly in the

near future.

The main technical limitation of the current state of

blockchains is the scalability issue, severely affecting cryp-

tocurrency applications. As shown earlier, in a supply chain

applications there are instances where new systems with high

throughput and low latency are implemented (e.g., [46]). This

is a promising attempt to make the blockchain technology

ﬂexible and even more efﬁcient for real life applications.

We believe that such limitations and preliminary results

should be viewed as opportunities for further research and not

discouraging factors. Moreover, the interoperability between

the various platforms needs to be addressed, as this would

allow companies with existing blockchain-based systems and

implementations of different platforms to cooperate without

neither party having to change their status quo. The integra-

tion of IoT and formulation of regulations and policies are

issues that need to be addressed widely for all applications of

blockchains so that the technology is not viewed merely as a

hype by the non-experts but as a standard choice for future

industrial, governmental and ﬁnancial transactions.

Speciﬁc to the supply chain application, the most crucial

challenge to be addressed is the link between a physical

product with its digital record so that the quality and origin of

the product can be authenticated on the chain. As discussed

in the previous sections, a lot of implementations choose to

leave certain data sharing tasks off-the-chain. It is necessary,

therefore to make the design details of this choice controlled

and immutable. The standardization of processes, and espe-

cially of the traceability and certiﬁcation of quality at the

various stages of food supply chains, are issues that need

to be addressed in manufacturing supply chains, irrespective

of the implementation. It is however noted that distributed

implementations through the use of technologies such as

blockchain would facilitate and speed up the procedures

towards standardization.

VI. CONCLUSIVE REMARKS

A decade after the publication of Bitcoin [1], the blockchain

technology is starting to hesitantly enter the industrial do-

main with the goal to take over manufacturing supply chains.

In this paper, we survey existing literature from academia, but

more importantly from industrial practices and use cases, in

order to assess the applicability and existing applications of

blockchains in the supply chain domain, the stage of research

and the maturity of the projects. More importantly, our goal

was to summarize the beneﬁts and the challenges from the

adoption, in order to provide a foundation for practitioners

and researchers to direct their future projects towards improv-

ing the technology and its applicability. In terms of the actual

implementations, we set forth to discuss the limitations of

such projects and their technical characteristics. An overview

of all existing use cases, whose technical details we could

VOLUME 4, 2016 13

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access (at least partly) can be seen in Table 9.

Overall, the application of blockchain technology in sup-

ply chains offers noumerous opportunities for researchers to

address innate issues of the technology (such as scalability)

and of practitioners (and the scientiﬁc communitiy in gen-

eral) to bring the technology in our everyday lives and closer

to the understanding and acceptance of the general public.

The silence kept by most industries applying the technology

with regards to the technical details of their systems is a

problematic issue that only impedes the progress of the

technology. As a result, most industries are hesitant towards

blockchains and consider it a hype for the elit companies.

Our vision is that more and more implementations will reveal

their systems to the community, so that more and more

companies will be persuaded to use it and governments and

unions will be therefore forced to standardize its involved

procedures and issue relevant policies.

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Peter Gonczol et al.: Preparation of Papers for IEEE TRANSACTIONS and JOURNALS

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VOLUME 4, 2016 15

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10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2964880, IEEE Access

Peter Gonczol et al.: Preparation of Papers for IEEE TRANSACTIONS and JOURNALS

[71] H. C. Hanebeck, N. Hewett, and P. A. McKay, “Inclusive deployment

of blockchain for supply chains: Part 3 – public or private blockchains

– Which one is right for you?” no. September, 2019. [Online].

Available: https://www.weforum.org/whitepapers/inclusive-deployment-

of-blockchain-for-supply-chains-part- 3-public- or-private-blockchains-

which-one-is-right- for-you

PETER GONCZOL is from Hungary, he re-

ceived a B.S degree in mechatronics engineering

from the Budapest University of Technology and

Economics. He is currently pursuing a M.S. degree

in Computer Science at the Technical University

of Denmark. His main research interests are web

and blockchain technologies.

PANAGIOTA (YOTA) KATSIKOULI was born in

Greece in 1987. She received the Diploma and

M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering and Infor-

matics from the Polytechnic University of Patras,

Greece, in 2011 and 2013 respectively, and the

Ph.D. degree in Informatics from the University

of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2017.

From 2017 to 2019, she was a Post-doctoral

Researcher with Inria at Lyon, France, after which

she spent a short period as Post-doctoral Re-

searcher with University College of Dublin, in Ireland. She is currently a

Post-Doctoral Researcher with the Technical University of Denmark. Her

research interests include distributed algorithms, blockchain technology,

human mobility, smart mobility, analytics for mobile data and distributed

algorithms for mobility data.

LASSE HERSKIND was born in Aarhus, Den-

mark in 1996. In 2018 he received a B.S degree

in software technology from the Technical Univer-

sity of Denmark, where he is currently pursuing

an M.S degree in Digital Media Engineering. His

research interests include blockchain technologies

and cryptographic protocols, with a focus on the

area of Zero-Knowledge proofs.

NICOLA DRAGONI is Associate Professor in

Distributed Systems and Security at DTU Com-

pute, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark,

and Professor in Computer Engineering at Centre

for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems, Örebro

University, Sweden. He is also afﬁliated with the

Copenhagen Center for Health Technology (CA-

CHET) and the Nordic IoT Hub. He got a M.Sc.

Degree (cum laude) and a Ph.D. in Computer

Science at University of Bologna, Italy. His main

research interests lie in the areas of pervasive computing and security,

with focus on domains like Internet-of-Things, Fog computing and mobile

systems. He has co-authored 100+ peer-reviewed papers in international

journals and conference proceedings, and he has edited 3 journal special

issues and 1 book. He is active in a number of national and international

projects.

16 VOLUME 4, 2016

Blockchain in Supply Chain Management: Implementation Issues and Privacy Concerns

Book

Full-text available

Jan 2024

Thomas Twenhöven

Examining the Potential and Hurdles of Blockchain Technology in Food Systems: An Overview

Article

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Apr 2025

Blockchain technology can potentially transform the food industry by offering opportunities for increased transparency, traceability, and efficiency. This review article explores the opportunities and challenges of blockchain in the food industry, including food safety and traceability, supply chain management, food authentication and verification, and consumer engagement. Blockchain can improve food safety and traceability, allowing the real‐time tracking of products and their ingredients from farms to forks. Blockchain can streamline supply chains, reduce waste, and improve efficiency. Blockchain can help verify the authenticity of food products and prevent counterfeiting and fraud. Blockchain can provide consumers with real‐time information about food products and encourage healthier choices. The adoption of blockchain technology in the food industry faces regulatory challenges, particularly in terms of food safety and labeling. Blockchain systems must address the security and privacy concerns of food industry stakeholders including consumers, farmers, and manufacturers. Blockchain technology holds significant potential for the food industry but presents significant challenges. This review article highlights the opportunities and challenges that blockchain presents in the food industry, areas where blockchain can have the greatest impact, and areas where further research and development are needed.

Blockchain-Enabled Tamper-Proof Vaccine Distribution Records

Article

Jan 2025

In a time when vaccination records are critical to public and individual health, a tamper-proof system is needed to manage and validate vaccination data. This article outlines a novel approach to creating an immutable, safe platform for inputting and verifying vaccination data using blockchain technology. The system uses a distributed approach for data entry and verification, protecting user privacy while ensuring the validity and integrity of vaccination records. The major objective is to build a strong foundation that uses blockchain technology to manage vaccination records, resulting in a straightforward, secure, and efficient method of storing and validating vaccinations. Using the core concepts of blockchain, the proposed system generates a permanent chain of blocks, each containing encrypted vaccine data. ..The primary goal is to build a strong foundation that uses blockchain technology to manage vaccination records, resulting in a simple, safe, and effective method of recording and validating vaccinations. The proposed system uses the core concepts of blockchain technology to create a permanent chain of blocks, each containing protected vaccine data. By using this method, individuals can keep control over their medical records and safeguard data from unauthorized access. This outlines the conceptual design and technical framework of the blockchain-based vaccination record system, pointing out its revolutionary potential for medical record management. The study also discusses the difficulties and moral dilemmas associated with this innovation, making it a thorough resource for legislators, technologists, and medical professionals looking to put this groundbreaking treatment into practice. INTRODUCTION The global healthcare scene has undergone a major shift in recent years, particularly with the arrival of vaccines as an essential instrument for preserving public health. The COVID-19 pandemic brought to light the importance of vaccination, and vaccine record handling acquired a lot of attention. Maintaining vaccination coverage and empowering individuals to access and share their medical records depend on the safety and confidentiality of vaccine data. However, it has been demonstrated that conventional systems for managing data are susceptible to data breaches and hacking. This highlights the possibility of disruption, with blockchain providing a unique remedy for this problem. Blockchain technology offers a decentralized, impenetrable ledger that has applications in many different fields, including medicine. It was first developed to accommodate cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. The idea is to create an irreversible network of knowledge blocks of information, each connected to the previous one, so that once information is recorded, it remains safe, transparent, and unchangeable. research's objective is to use the technology of blockchain: To create a platform for vaccine registration and proof in this regard. The key goals are: 1. Security: Create a tamper-proof and secure platform for collecting and organizing vaccination data to lessen the chance of data manipulation or misuse without authorization. 886 J INFORM SYSTEMS ENG, 10(27s) 2. Decentralization: Transfer power from centralized authorities to individuals by giving them the ability to handle and share vaccination records while maintaining their privacy. 3. Efficiency: Create an easy-to-use and efficient system that permits people to keep control of their health information, reduces the administrative burden on doctors and hospitals, and facilitates data sharing. This describes the a blockchain-based vaccination record system's architectural layout and execution plan, taking both technological and ethical considerations into account. By doing this, it hopes to create opportunities for a future in medical record management that is more transparent and secure, ensuring patients can rely on the accuracy of their vaccination records, medical personnel can streamline processes without compromising data security. BACKGROUND

Blockchain- Enabled Tamper-Proof Vaccine Distribution Records

Article

Mar 2025

Rupali Mahajan

Blockchain-Enabled Lean Automation and Risk Mitigation in Supply Chain 4.0 A Systematic Review and Future Directions

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2025

Supply Chain 4.0, powered by Industry 4.0 technologies, will turn traditional operations into smart and agile systems that are significantly more efficient, resilient, and sustainable. However, most of the available literature related to blockchain enabled supply chains focuses on individual applications such as fraud prevention or logistics optimization, and very few have considered its holistic potential in lean automation and risk mitigation. Besides, limited integration of complementary technologies like IoT and AI, challenges to scalability, interoperability, and regulatory issues are still considered to be crucial implementation obstacles. This review fills these gaps through a systematic analysis of insights from more than 100 peer-reviewed studies across diverse industries, including healthcare, agriculture, and manufacturing. It synthesizes the potentials of blockchain in lean automation and operational resilience, providing a conceptual framework for integrating Industry 4.0 technology toward enhanced end-to-end performance in supply chains. Further, the review puts forward workable strategies on how to overcome various barriers to the implementation of such technological integration and pinpoints future research avenues toward fostering sustainability and a human-centered approach to supply chains according to Industry 5.0 principles. By addressing critical research challenges, this paper offers actionable insights for researchers, policymakers, and industry practitioners to build resilient and transparent global supply chains.

Blockchain in the pharmaceutical sector: empirical evidence on the associated challenges and countermeasures

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Jun 2025
INT J PROD ECON

A Novel Blockchain based Security paradigm for sustainable supply chain Majestics and Logistics

Conference Paper

Dec 2024

Exploring the Integration of Blockchain in IoT Use Cases (Challenges & Opportunities)

Thesis

Full-text available

Apr 2025

Awobelem George

Blockchain and The Internet of Things (IoT) is a significant paradigm which has gained traction in today’s digital age as two complimentary technologies. The combination of IoT's connectivity with blockchain's security creates new opportunities and solves problems associated with centralized systems. This culminating project aims to delve deeper into the integration of blockchain technology in IoT applications based on select use cases to uncover potential benefits and significant challenges of blockchain integration across different sectors. The research objectives to be addressed are: (RO1) How emerging vulnerabilities manifest in the implementation of blockchain within current IoT ecosystems. (RO2) How current opportunities and challenges are influencing the successful integration of blockchain in IoT ecosystems. The findings from the case studies are: (RO1) Significant vulnerabilities exist within core blockchain features such as smart contracts which could lead to cascading failures and widespread system disruption within an IoT ecosystem. Additionally, difficulty in quickly patching smart contract vulnerabilities due to blockchain immutability further exacerbates this risk. (RO2) The successful integration of blockchain in IoT has the potential to provide enhanced trust, performance and security however significant bottlenecks such as interoperability challenges between various IoT devices and blockchain protocols, effective consensus mechanisms suited for resource constrained IoT devices and scalability challenges must be navigated to achieve a seamless integration of the technologies The conclusions are: (RO1) IoT-blockchain convergence introduces new potential attack vectors that must be analyzed and secured, especially at the intersection of resource-constrained IoT devices and computationally intensive blockchain protocols. (RO2) Blockchain integration in IoT requires specific considerations related to the heterogenous nature of IoT devices, resource limitations for traditional IoT ecosystems, scalability of blockchain solutions in the diverse nature of IoT ecosystems and standardization and compatibility of different blockchain platforms across IoT applications. Areas of further study include researching minimum security requirements in software development of IoT devices which can support complex computational requirements needed for successful integration of blockchain in IoT applications and improving blockchain security against quantum attacks. Public-key cryptography, a cornerstone of blockchain security, is particularly susceptible to such threats.

Enhancing Livestock Supply Chains with Blockchain Traceability from Source to Market: A Survey

Conference Paper

Feb 2025

Integrated electric ground vehicle and drone with blockchain-driven approach for routing delivery

Article

Apr 2025
COMPUT OPER RES

A BLOCKCHAIN TRACEABILITY INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR TRUST IMPROVEMENT IN AGRICULTURAL SUPPLY CHAIN

Conference Paper

Full-text available

Jan 2020

1 Abstract Across organizations, the integration of business processes and information is crucial for all involved parties. However, the lack of trust is often a roadblock. Researches show that supply chains have incurred challenges in information sharing and trust, while trust widely works in supply chain practices and deeply affects supply chain decisions. On the other hand, Blockchain as an emerging technology for decentralized and transactional data sharing across a network of untrusted participants has appeared to have many applications. The main purpose of this research is trying to increase trust among agricultural supply chain parties to guarantee the food quality, safety and sustainability from a supply chain management perspective, and the key issue is using a decentralized technology which is not dependent on the trust of a central authority or organization for the whole supply chain. Using Design Science Research method, this research is going to develop an artifact to explore the most important trust requirements and priorities at every stage of agricultural supply chain, required to implement a blockchain information system for real-time agricultural food traceability. Special emphasis has been placed on the roles of the incorporation of the IoT in Blockchain-based solutions.

The Rise of Blockchain Technology in Agriculture and Food Supply Chains

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2019
TRENDS FOOD SCI TECH

Blockchain is an emerging digital technology allowing ubiquitous financial transactions among distributed untrusted parties, without the need of intermediaries such as banks. This article examines the impact of blockchain technology in agriculture and food supply chain, presents existing ongoing projects and initiatives, and discusses overall implications, challenges and potential, with a critical view over the maturity of these projects. Our findings indicate that blockchain is a promising technology towards a transparent supply chain of food, with many ongoing initiatives in various food products and food-related issues, but many barriers and challenges still exist, which hinder its wider popularity among farmers and systems. These challenges involve technical aspects, education, policies and regulatory frameworks.

Boundary conditions for traceability in food supply chains using blockchain technology

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2019
INT J INFORM MANAGE

Traceability of ingredients in food supply chains has become paramount in a world in which markets become global, heterogeneous, and complex and in which consumers expect a high level of quality. The food supply chain consists of many organizations having different interests and are often reluctant to share traceability information with each other. Blockchain has been advocated for improving traceability by providing trust. Yet, practice proved to be more stubborn. The goal of this paper is to identify boundary conditions for sharing assurance information to improve traceability. Four cases in the food supply chain have been investigated using a template analysis of 16 interviews. Eighteen boundary conditions categorized in business, regulation, quality and traceability categories have been identified. Some boundary conditions were found in all supply chains, whereas others were found to be supply chain specific. Standardization of traceability processes and interfaces, having a joint platform and independent governance were found to be key boundary conditions before blockchain can be used. Our findings imply that supply chain systems have first to be modified and organizational measures need to be taken to fulfill the boundary conditions, before blockchain can be used successfully.

Blockchain applications in supply chains, transport and logistics: a systematic review of the literature

Article

Aug 2019

This paper presents current academic and industrial frontiers on blockchain application in supply chain, logistics and transport management. We conduct a systematic review of the literature and find four main clusters in the co-citation analysis, namely Technology, Trust, Trade, and Traceability/Transparency. For each cluster, and based on the pool of articles included in it, we apply an inductive method of reasoning and discuss the emerging themes and applications of blockchains for supply chains, logistics and transport. We conclude by discussing the main themes for future research on blockchain technology and its application in industry and services.

AQUACHAIN -Water Supply-Chain management using Distributed Ledger Technology

Conference Paper

Feb 2019

Blockchain applications in supply chains, transport and logistics: a systematic review of the literature

Article

Aug 2019
INT J PROD RES

Mehrdokht Pournader

Textile and Apparel Supply Chain with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)

Conference Paper

Jun 2019

Exploring the impact of blockchain on digitized Supply Chain flows: A literature review

Conference Paper

Jun 2019

Blockchains and the Supply Chain: Findings from a Broad Study of Practitioners

Article

Jul 2019

Blockchain is an emergent technology that has attracted practitioner attention in the supply chain domain. Multiple motivators lead companies to incorporate blockchain technology into their supply chain. However, a number of barriers and challenges may impede the successful adoption of blockchains. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a variety of motivators and barriers are perceived by different companies from different industries. This paper summarizes survey data gathered from 173 respondents associated with the Association of Supply Chain Management (ASCM), formerly APICS. Summary statistics on blockchain adoption by various types of companies are provided to help practitioners benchmark current practice. The paper presents preliminary findings on these dimensions with some insights provided.

Blockchains in operations and supply chains: A model and reference implementation

Article

Jul 2019
COMPUT IND ENG

Blockchain is a promising information technology which can provide several potential applications related to operations and supply chains. By using distributed software architecture and advanced computing, blockchain can solve the problem of immutable ledgers distributed to several actors in the chain. This paper reviews blockchain technology and outlines possible uses for immutable distributed ledgers in operations and supply chains. A classification of the applications of blockchain technology in the scope of operations and supply chain management is presented. In order to demonstrate the technical architecture of the blockchain-based logistics monitoring system (BLMS), a reference implementation was programmed and tested based on Ethereum. The purpose of the BLMS is to provide a solution for parcel tracking in a supply chain to support an open and immutable history record for each transaction. The functionality of the system consists of transaction entry for logistics operators. The presented reference architecture demonstrates how blockchain can be implemented in the operations and supply chain context by using software components.

Blockchain Implementations and Use Cases for Supply Chains – A Survey

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