AgriHandshake - Blockchain Based Smart Contract between Farmers & Vendors

Abstract

Agricultural trade in developing countries continues to depend on informal agreements, multi-tier intermediary networks, and centralized payment mechanisms, resulting in payment delays of 30–90 days, information asymmetry, and weakened bargaining power for smallholder farmers. This paper presents AgriHandshake, a blockchain-based smart contract platform enabling direct crop trading between farmers and vendors through an automated escrow payment mechanism deployed on the Ethereum network. The system employs a hybrid architecture that stores cryptographic state hashes and escrow logic onchain while offloading trade metadata and delivery documentation to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), reducing average transaction gas costs to approximately 85,000–210,000 gas units per operation. A Solidity-based escrow contract enforces a structured four-state machine (CREATED→FUNDED→DELIVERED→COMPLETED/DISPUTED) with a 72-hour automatic payment-release timer implemented via block.timestamp. Experimental evaluation on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet demonstrates average smart contract function execution latency under 15 seconds, end-to-end trade confirmation within 3–8 minutes including IPFS upload, and strong resistance to reentrancy and front-running attacks. Comparative analysis against eNAM, FarMarket, and AgriOnBlock confirms that AgriHandshake is the first platform to combine a dedicated escrow payment guarantee, decentralized off-chain storage, and a farmer-centric usability model within a single deployable framework