Blockchain based transparent and reliable framework for wheat crop supply chain

• Published in: PloS one 2024-01, Vol.19 (1), p.e0295036-e0295036
• Main Authors: Farooq, Muhammad Shoaib, Ansari, Zain Khalid, Alvi, Atif, Rustam, Furqan, Díez, Isabel De La Torre, Mazón, Juan Luis Vidal, Rodríguez, Carmen Lili, Ashraf, Imran
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agriculture; Biology and Life Sciences; Blockchain; By products; Cereal crops; Commerce; Crop yields; Crops; Cryptococcus neoformans; Cryptosporidiosis; Economic models; Engineering and Technology; Food safety; Humans; Latency; Logistics; Management; Production management; Reproducibility of Results; Security; Social Sciences; Supply chain management; Supply chains; Transparency; Triticum; Wheat; Wheat industry
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0295036

The wheat crop that fulfills 35% of human food demand is facing several problems due to a lack of transparency, security, reliability, and traceability in the existing agriculture supply chain. Many systems have been developed for the agriculture supply chain to overcome such issues, however, monopolistic centralized control is the biggest hurdle to realizing the use of such systems. It has eventually gained consumers' trust in branded products and rejected other products due to the lack of traceable supply chain information. This study proposes a blockchain-based framework for supply chain traceability which provides trustable, transparent, secure, and reliable services for the wheat crop. A crypto token called wheat coin (WC) has been introduced to keep track of transactions among the stakeholders of the wheat supply chain. Moreover, an initial coin offering (ICO) of WC, crypto wallets, and an economic model are proposed. Furthermore, a smart contract-based transaction system has been devised for the transparency of wheat crop transactions and conversion of WC to fiat and vice versa. We have developed the interplanetary file system (IPFS) to improve data availability, security, and transparency which stores encrypted private data of farmers, businesses, and merchants. Lastly, the results of the experiments show that the proposed framework shows better performance as compared to previous crop supply chain solutions in terms of latency to add-blocks, per-minute transactions, average gas charge for the transaction, and transaction verification time. Performance analysis with Bitcoin and Ethereum shows the superior performance of the proposed system.