Blockchain has seen a significant rise in adoption, initially driven by its use for digital cryptocurrency. In more recent years, examples have emerged that allows Blockchain to be used as a tamper-proof database, to record everything from house sales to parcel deliveries. However, Blockchain isn’t perfect. It was developed to record digital information, not physical information.
The general assumption is that the person entering the data is honest, trustworthy and incapable of entering false information. If that was true, you could argue that Blockchain wasn’t needed in the first place, any database would work just as well. Any bad actor in your supply chain can simply scan a barcode from a product and enter the information into the blockchain records, but what stops that individual from entering false data? Well, the answer is nothing.
So Barcodes on the Blockchain solution might as well be Bullshit on a Blockchain. If you are marketing your business as relying entirely on someone’s Blockchain, it might just be a band-aid solution for an unchecked supply chain. And when it goes wrong, will the public believe your brand is to blame, or is it the fault of the technology which everyone already trusts? Yep you guessed it, the brand will be the one to take the fall.
At FibreTrace® we recognised this gap from the outset and have developed patented, proprietary, high-security physical scanners which are used in conjunction with a mobile phone and our FibreTrace® platform, to ensure that we can verify the physical assets match the digital Blockchain record. This unique, composite key of information makes it impossible for a bad actor to cover their tracks. If the wrong product is scanned, in the wrong location at the wrong time, our system will immediately know. We bridged the air gap between the Digital and Physical worlds with a higher degree of certainty than any other real-time method available on the market.
Education is needed in the industry to understand the limitation of any new technology, rather than complacently accepting that what is new is foolproof. Blockchain itself is not.
As the saying goes, we’re only human. If you are solely trusting the corruptible and error-prone human in the supply chain but still reaping the benefits of trust by badging it with a Blockchain element, you risk all your marketing and investment efforts by not addressing the real flaws still present in your supply chain. So don’t invest in B****** on a Blockchain, invest in solving the supply chain trust problem at the root cause - matching the digital with the physical.
