A Conceptual Framework for Trustworthy and Incentivized Trading of Food Grains using Distributed Ledger and Smart Contracts

Abstract

Blockchain has transformed business processes from centralized to decentralized. It can better help in making food grain supply chain fully decentralized with peer to peer (P2P) business by removing intermediaries, and thus reducing the overall cost at end user side with better returns to farmers. In this paper, we explore a blockchain technology and the required smart contracts for trustworthy and incentivized P2P trading of food grains. We propose different smart contracts such as food grain supply, bidding, trading and utilization, which are deployed on ethereum blockchain for the decentralized trading of food grains. We use Vickrey-Clarkegrove (Vickrey auction) method for achieving the incentivized trading for both farmers and end users. The proposed framework offers P2P trading, security of food grain data, data transparency, user's anonymity and incentives in the trading process. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated and analyzed in terms of fulfilling the requirements of food grain supply management.