A community-based hybrid blockchain architecture for the organic food supply chain

Abstract

This paper presents a novel blockchain architecture to incorporate community-level trust into the organic food supply chain by hybridizing Proof of Authority (PoA) and Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus protocols. Community-level trust is an important aspect in the organic agriculture industry. Organic farming, in most parts of the world, happens in small scale farms where the farmers represent rural and less-privileged communities. Even though third-party certification systems exist for quality assurance in organic farming, due to many socio-economic reasons, participatory guarantee systems (PGS) have become a popular alternative among organic farmers and consumers. However, such participatory guarantee systems are still prone to frauds and have limitations in scalability as well. With the recent rise of blockchain technology, there is an emerging trend to adopt blockchain technology to enhance the credibility of organic food supply chains and mitigate the risk of fraudulent transactions. However, despite the popularity of participatory guarantee systems among organic farmer communities, the blockchain researchers have paid little attention to develop blockchain architectures by adopting the community-level trust into their consensus protocols. The hybrid consensus mechanism presented in this paper addresses that gap in existing blockchain research. Apart from discussing the details of the proposed blockchain architecture and the underlying consensus protocol, this paper also presents a qualitative analysis on the proposed architecture based on expert opinions.