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The authors, a group of researchers from the University of Beirut and University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, take an empirical approach to the analysis of blockchain applications in the supply chain management (SCM) context. The paper begins with a literature review of common problems in both SCM and blockchain development before examining two case studies, namely Ambrosus and Modum, two Swiss startups “that merge IoT, blockchain technology, and real-time sensors” for track and trace. In addition to the challenges of choosing the right blockchain for the right problem, the authors highlight the challenge of validating data before it is irrevocably committed to the blockchain. Both companies opted to have a secondary storage type due to the high costs and low capacity of data storage on the blockchain. Ambrosus developed its own blockchain written in Solidity on top of Ethereum, allowing them to run their smart contracts on their own platform and eventually copy it over to the Ethereum main network.
Overall the article was an informative examination of two real-world blockchain applications and the problems they faced with both their underlying blockchain platforms and the services built on top. There were a few typos in the paper, and the authors repeatedly referred to Hyperledger as a single entity rather than mentioning a specific project. They also made an uncited claim that I am not sure is valid - “Hyperledger will stop working when the number of servers and nodes reach a certain threshold because the number of dropped consensus messages will increase due to channel request congestion.”
This paper would be a useful resource to anyone looking for a more concrete discussion of the unique problems that arise from using a blockchain-based supply chain.
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