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Blockchain for Provenance and Traceability

ScienceSoft applies 35 years of experience in IT and proficiency in supply chain management and blockchain development to design and build robust blockchain solutions for provenance and traceability.

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Blockchain for Provenance and Traceability - ScienceSoft
Blockchain for Provenance and Traceability - ScienceSoft

Contributors

Dennis Taului

Blockchain Consultant, ScienceSoft

Stacy Dubovik

Blockchain Researcher, ScienceSoft

Blockchain for Provenance and Traceability: The Essence

Blockchain-based traceability is gaining popularity as a way to securely share asset provenance data among the supply chain parties, quickly prove goods’ authenticity and origin, streamline claim resolution, and accurately spot fraud and counterfeiting.

Blockchain for traceability and provenance provides complete visibility of asset-related data and transactions, enables product source data backtracking in seconds rather than days, and offers enhanced protection of sensitive business information.

Market Info: Blockchain Technology in Provenance and Traceability

The global blockchain market was estimated at $17.57 billion in 2023. It is forecasted to reach $825.93 billion by 2032 at a CAGR of 52.8%. Increasing demand for facilitated tracking of inventory and asset provenance and end-to-end traceability of goods-related events and transactions is the main driver for the popularity of specialized blockchain solutions across various industries, from food manufacturing and fashion retail to healthcare and real estate.

How Blockchain for Provenance and Traceability Works

Main use cases

Supply chain and logistics management

End-to-end traceability of multi-party obligations, goods shipment, and payments across multiple supply chain tiers. Assuring the supply authenticity and origin, which is critical for inventory like drugs, food products, and electronic components.

Asset management

Immutable asset records for various industries, from real estate and entertainment to luxury retail and additive manufacturing, to prove asset provenance and prevent fraud and counterfeiting.

Management of legal ownership documents

An immutable audit trail of all manipulations across legal documents that serve as proof of ownership, including document creation, editing, viewing, and sharing.

Claim management

Providing proof of goods provenance and a full history of all multi-party transactions for transparent resolution of claim disputes, e.g., on goods quality or authenticity.

Sample architecture

In the blockchain network for provenance and traceability, once validated and encrypted, data and transactions are stored in timestamped blocks linked in chronological order. The blocks form an immutable distributed ledger that serves as a database shared by multiple authorized parties and provides a single source of truth to verify the provenance of assets and inventory. Network participants interact with the distributed ledger to transact and trace data using role-specific web applications.

Architecture of blockchain for provenance and traceability - ScienceSoft

Key features

Traceability of multi-party transactions

A distributed ledger available to the blockchain network participants provides an immutable record and real-time view of all transactions between the involved parties.

Smart contracts

Protocols that enable automated enforcement of fixed obligations under multi-party agreements (e.g., making payments, transfer of responsibility or ownership) upon the pre-defined events.

Automated recordkeeping

All transactions between the blockchain network participants, including those initiated by smart contracts, are automatically validated, timestamped, and recorded in the distributed ledger.

Product provenance tracking

Data on the product journey from raw material origin through shipment, processing, and quality check across different locations and responsible parties can be tracked in the blockchain by multiple parties at any point.

Consensus-based data validation

The rules for automated validation of transactions and prioritization of their processing and storage are specified by pre-defined consensus protocols, e.g., proof-of-stake (for public blockchains) or selective endorsement (for private or consortium blockchains).

Hashing

A hash value, which serves as a unique cryptographic identifier, is automatically generated for each piece of data in the blockchain network. Even a minor change in the data leads to a change in all the output hash values, which makes it tamper-evident.

Security

Blockchain data security is achieved via multi-factor authentication, role-based controls, intelligent fraud detection, transferred data encryption, and more.

Configurable access rights

In case of private or consortium blockchain, the rights to transact, view or share data can be configured for various participants.

Ready To Build Blockchain for Improved Traceability?

ScienceSoft’s team is ready to help you roll out a competitive blockchain solution that allows for facilitated traceability and provenance tracking and quickly drives a high ROI.

GET BLOCKCHAIN SOFTWARE

Blockchain Traceability: Featured Success Stories by ScienceSoft

Blockchain Consulting and Development by ScienceSoft

Since 2020, ScienceSoft has been providing full-cycle blockchain development services to create reliable blockchain solutions for end-to-end traceability of transactions and events.

Blockchain for provenance and traceability consulting

  • Analyzing your business needs and eliciting requirements for a blockchain system for provenance and traceability.
  • Suggesting optimal blockchain network type, architecture design, and tech stack.
  • Providing a detailed set of blockchain provenance and traceability features.
  • Preparing a plan of integrations with the required software (e.g., ERP, accounting software, selling platforms).
  • Blockchain security consulting.
  • Delivering a roadmap for blockchain system implementation and a risk mitigation plan.
Go for consulting

Blockchain for provenance and traceability development

  • Blockchain for provenance and traceability needs analysis.
  • Blockchain software conceptualization.
  • Architecture design of the blockchain for provenance and traceability.
  • Blockchain for provenance and traceability development.
  • Integrating the blockchain system into an existing software ecosystem.
  • Testing and quality assurance.
  • User training.
  • Blockchain software support and evolution (if required).
Go for development

What makes ScienceSoft different

We achieve project success no matter what

ScienceSoft does not pass mere project administration off as project management, which, unfortunately, often happens on the market. We practice real project management, achieving project success for our clients no matter what.

See how we do it

Technology Stack for Blockchain Implementation

The Challenges of Blockchain for Provenance and Traceability

Challenge #1: High quality of input data

Once recorded in the blockchain ledger, data becomes immutable. Low-quality input data is bound to remain stored in the blockchain, which can result in inaccurate product provenance identification or the incorrect resolution of product quality and asset ownership claims.

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Solution

The blockchain solution can be powered with AI, which provides intelligent data reconciliation to ensure data accuracy and fraud detection, identify suspicious transactions, and prevent their upload into the system.

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Challenge #2: Continuous upload of supply chain data

Blockchain needs to continuously collect all available supply chain data to maintain a complete history of data on product provenance, location, and storage conditions and trace products in real time. Thus, the solution has to seamlessly integrate with all relevant software tools (including legacy ones) of multiple blockchain network participants.

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Solution

Well-documented integration APIs help the blockchain solution enable fast and smooth connection to multiple data sources, including back-office software or sensors (e.g., to trace temperature-sensitive food products or drugs). However, the APIs have limited application when blockchain needs integration with legacy software. In this case, the blockchain solution may require custom-built integrations.

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Dennis Taului

ScienceSoft's Blockchain Consultant

Complex asset operations like cross-border goods shipment or mortgaged property sales involve massive volumes of documents that legally prove asset responsibility and ownership transfers. Blockchain uses such documents to inform recorded transactions and needs to provide users with instant access to the source documentation. Storing large documents directly on the blockchain is unfeasible due to cost and privacy issues. We implement scalable cloud storage solutions like IPFS or AWS S3 to avoid ineffective on-chain storage and integrate them with the blockchain for quick and secure document sharing.

Costs of Blockchain-Based Software for Provenance and Traceability

The cost of blockchain development varies greatly depending on:

  • Blockchain network type (private, public, consortium, hybrid).
  • The type of consensus protocol (PoW, PoS, selective endorsement, etc.).
  • The number and complexity of a solution’s functional modules, including smart contracts.
  • The number and complexity of web and/or mobile applications for various user groups (e.g., suppliers, end consumers, LSPs) to interact with the blockchain solution.
  • The volume of data to be migrated from spreadsheets and/or existing supply chain management software.
  • The number and complexity of integrations with required software (e.g., ERP, accounting software, selling platforms).
  • Application availability, performance, and security requirements.
  • Blockchain interoperability capabilities.
  • The required deliverable (PoC, MVP, a full-scale solution), which influences the duration of blockchain development.
Pricing Information

From ScienceSoft’s experience, the development cost for an MVP of blockchain-based provenance and traceability software will be around $80,000–$150,000. Building a full-featured blockchain solution that comprises a private network and smart contracts requires investments of $400,000–$1,500,000+.

Want to know the cost of your blockchain solution?

Use our free calculator

Learn the Cost of Your Blockchain Solution

Answer a few questions about your business needs to help our consultants estimate the cost of your unique blockchain software quicker.

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*What type of company do you represent?

*What industry should your blockchain solution serve?

*What is your industry?

Are you going to sell your software to:

*How many individuals will use your software, approximately?

*How many organizations are you planning to target, approximately?

*How many end users (individuals from all organizations) will use your software, approximately?

How many organizations are you planning to target, approximately?

*How many end users (both corporate and individual users) will use your software, approximately?

What is the expected number of users?

*What is the expected daily transaction volume?

*What blockchain solution do you want to develop?

*What area should your planned blockchain network serve?

*What kind of decentralized marketplace do you need?

*What assets would you like to tokenize?

*Which method of storage should your crypto wallet provide?

*Should your wallet support multiple cryptocurrencies?

*What areas should your planned smart contracts serve?

*What type of crypto assets would you like to introduce?

*What kind of DeFi platform do you need?

*What kind of blockchain-based application do you need?

*Which blockchain software version do you currently need?

*Which platforms should your blockchain app support?

*What type of blockchain data storage do you prefer?

*Would you need to operate and store metadata (documents, images, videos, sensor data, etc.)?

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High-volume metadata can be stored off-chain to optimize operational costs.

*Would you require any integrations?

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With other blockchain solutions, corporate software, external data sources, third-party services (user authentication, payment systems), etc.

*Are there any compliance requirements for your planned solution? Choose all that apply.

*What is the current stage of your project?

*Do you have tech stack preferences?

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Blockchain frameworks and networks, particular programming languages, cloud services, etc.

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Our Blockchain Insights

Blockchain for Supply Chain

ScienceSoft lists the main use cases, key features, challenges, and cost factors of blockchain for supply chain management and inventory control.

Blockchain in the Food Supply Chain

Learn the main use cases and features of blockchain in the food supply chain, implementation costs and ways to solve its major challenges.

About ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft is a global IT consulting and software development company headquartered in McKinney, Texas. Since 2020, we have been helping businesses implement blockchain for improved traceability of data and transactions. In our blockchain projects, we employ robust quality management and data security management systems supported by ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certificates.