A Comparative Study of Blockchain Platforms for Transparent Agricultural Food Supply Chains: Evaluating Ethereum, Solana, Hyperledger Fabric, VeChain, Corda, Zcash and Monero

Abstract

The global agricultural supply chain that supplies the world's food faces transparency, traceability and security as significant challenges, with trust being the main casualty due to numerous food safety incidents. The blockchain technology is turning out to be a good solution to the problem of supply chain but the numerous platforms available make it difficult for the implementers to choose. This paper offers a detailed comparison of seven most discussed blockchain platforms Ethereum, Solana, Hyperledger Fabric, VeChain, Corda, Zcash and Monero for applications in the agricultural supply chain. The study builds a well-organized evaluation framework dealing with seven parameters such as scalability, privacy features, consensus mechanisms, smart contract capabilities and implementation costs. The results reveal that although many platforms have specific advantages, Solana is the one with the most excellent performance for large volume applications of the agricultural supply chain because of its outstanding throughput (65, 000 TPS), very low transaction costs (~$0.00025) and very short confirmation times. The research points out that the technical capabilities of Solana are very much similar to the requirements of the agricultural food supply chains that aim at being transparent and hence the most convenient combination of performance, cost and functionality for sector wide implementation.