A Survey on Using Blockchain in Trade Supply Chain Solutions

Abstract

Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology to ensure trust between parties. By using this technology, we can establish a secure communication paradigm, where data integrity and immutability can be guaranteed. These inherited features underline blockchain as a suitable technology to optimise the adopted processing model in several domains, such as health, trade supply chain and food safety. In this paper, we present a detailed overview of the use of blockchain technology in (international) trade supply chains. Furthermore, the discussed proposals have been classified based on the target application scenarios. Our goal is to clarify the benefits of applying this technology to the trading domain and highlight the challenges that are associated with applying this technology to optimise the trading domain. Accordingly, we underline several issues that occur during the designing of the blockchain solution to optimise the (international) trade supply chain.