Proof of Transaction (PoTx) Based Traceability System for an Agriculture Supply Chain

Abstract

Tracing the origin of the product in the agriculture supply chain offers food safety, identifying the root cause of the food hazard if any, information connectivity between the participating stakeholders and to achieve customer trust. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology whose transactions can be recorded in a decentralised and immutable ledger. Several applications were developed in the last few years for blockchain based - traceability systems. Most of the work concentrated on information retrieval and system scalability. Still, promising research has not been seen for a blockchain traceability system with user identification methods. This work presents a blockchain system with user identification and access control mechanisms to fill the gap for each supply chain participant. In addition, the system also proposes a novel Proof of Transaction (PoTx) consensus algorithm designed to achieve scalability with reduced communication overhead and computation power. A novel PoTx algorithm is developed by choosing a random validator from a consensus group based on the transaction count to enforce the fault-tolerance of the system. The proposed system with user identification method allows to prevent and identify product adulteration while tracing the agriculture product.

Keywords

• Supply chain
• blockchain
• traceability
• proof of transaction
• decentralized
• smart contracts