The Internet of Trust: Securing and Transparent Supply Chains with Blockchain and IoT

Abstract

In an era where digital commerce continues to burgeon, the conventional supply chain confronts challenges of inefficiency, fraud, and a dearth of transparency. Blockchain, renowned for its decentralized and immutable ledger, emerges as a compelling solution to transform the e-commerce supply chain landscape. In conventional supply chain practices marked by centralized databases and manual record-keeping, inefficiencies and a dearth of transparency are widespread. Challenges stemming from cumbersome paperwork, delayed information flow, and vulnerability to errors hindered effective coordination, traceability, and overall operational efficiency. Blockchain and IoT can elevate e-commerce supply chains by ensuring transparent, secure, and automated data-sharing, fostering efficiency and trust throughout the entire process. We have presented an Ethereum-based blockchain and Internet of Things e-commerce platform in this paper. We describe in detail how to put in place a system that stores a product’s journey’s details on an immutable distributed ledger. This allows for secure tracing of a product’s origin. The prototype of the system is deployed and tested on Hardhat testing framework. Traditional databases and cloud storages have been replaced by blockchain and IPFS. IPFS is used as the decentralized and distributed storage layer, facilitating the secure and efficient storage of credentials. Furthermore, the results of our experiments and security and scalability analyses demonstrate the viability of our suggested model.