I bet everyone of you, that heard about Blockchain knows that “Blockchain can be used for traceability of lots of stuff and it will be our Panacea”.
Well, you are almost right. And in this case, almost right equals to the basketball “almost basket” that means that the ball almost went in, but in the end, it went out.
“Actually right” = Wrong. Let’s find out why.
At first, the most suitable blockchain in terms of adaptivity of Smart Contracts is the Ethereum Blockchain. But if you want to insert all data in the Blockchain you would need to pay a lot of Gas Fees. Especially during DeFi bubbles.
To solve the Gas Fees problem we can make a distributed (centralized) ledger that periodically integrates data with the Blockchain. A sort of Layer 2 of the Blockchain. In this way, you will have the most part of transactions made on a database, that often get synchronized with the Blockchain to check if last data are congruent with previous ones.
Sounds better. Yes. Until here we got how the data will be processed by the blockchain.
Now we must understand how the data should be inserted into the Blockchain. If an operator will insert data into the blockchain who will guarantee the correctness of the inserted data? What if the certified biological products are replaced with non-biological? How can the Blockchain detect this fraud?
Well, it is easy. Blockchain cannot know that data inserted at the beginning of the supply chain are wrong because it has nothing to compare this data with.
And if someone will replace items during the supply chain?
Well, the answer to both of this open question is the same. You have an independent third party that makes cross-checks. Sometimes during the supply chain a third party control should happen to check if data are correct and true.
How to make it?
Well, Blockchain means decentralization and relying on a third-party control is kind of a contradiction, unless the third party is decentralized as well. The third party may eventually be a committee of different people, from different academic and professional background with multiple figures in the same position.
Let’s say we are trying to trace the famous Sicilian lemons. You may need an agronomist, a health inspector, a quality controller and many more. If you have 10 health inspectors, that are randomly chosen to go for the cross-check, the risk of fraud is so low that even Made in Italy would become again one of the most important brand in the World.
Decentralization is the way and third-party controls are not a bottleneck: they just need to be decentralized as well.
What are your considerations on it?
