QANplatform Use Case Story: Supply Chain
Learn how blockchain is disrupting supply chain management and how businesses can build quantum-resistant blockchain applications on QANplatform.
Blockchain technology presents incredible opportunities for improvement across the global supply chain. It has the potential to enhance supply chain traceability and transparency, reduce operational overheads, and increase efficiency.
Let’s dive right in to learn more about the impact of blockchain in supply chain management and why the QAN blockchain platform is arguably the best choice for building supply chain solutions.
The Global Supply Chain Market: A Brief Overview
The supply chain market consists of the different organizations and stakeholders that contribute to the transformation of natural resources, raw materials, and components into a finished product and delivering the same to the end customer.
The whole supply chain is linked through the physical flow of goods and an informational flow, which involves coordination between partners and plans in each stage of the chain. The complexities involved in this process resulted in the concept of supply chain management (SCM).
Supply chain management was designed to meet customer demands through the efficient use of resources, labour, distribution capacity, and inventory.
Companies are looking to leverage new technologies to improve their supply chain management and reduce costs while meeting customer demands for traceability, transparency, and accountability.
The supply chain management market is expected to see tremendous growth. In 2020, the global supply chain management market was worth around $15.85 billion and is expected to reach US $31 billion in 2026.
How Blockchain Is Disrupting the Supply Chain
Transparency
Supply chain processes can be quite complex and overwhelming, especially when lots of participants are involved. Many problems plague the supply chain process as there’s little or no transparency in legacy systems. Stakeholders have no visibility or effective communication in the supply chain, hence no one can trust its data accuracy. As a result, there have been countless data discrepancies in supply chain systems, leading to disputes.
The distributed nature of blockchain technology can boost supply chain transparency and traceability. Every transaction and movement in the supply chain can be documented and cryptographically linked to each other with a unique identifier and time-stamped. This creates an immutable record of data in the supply chain, enabling anyone to track products from the manufacturer to the final consumers and, who had access to them.
Moreover, since one central party can’t change records, consumers can easily settle disputes, improving accountability. Bad products can be tracked all through their journey in the supply chain to see where and how it became bad.
According to a study, the ability of blockchain systems to prove authenticity can improve global GDP by $962 billion.
Efficiency
The current paperwork workflows and many intermediaries involved in supply chain management slows down the whole process. Stakeholders exist separately and are burdened with providing costs for the task and labor involved in managing these physical documents.
Blockchain technology can improve efficiency in supply chains by eliminating the ineffective paperwork workflows through a centrally distributed digital platform where all stakeholders interact directly without the need for third parties.
Payment solutions can be integrated into the platform through smart contracts, reducing time wasted in payment processing and ensuring the fast movements of products in the chain.
Combining blockchain technology with emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) can also boost supply chain automation. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, for example, can be integrated into a blockchain to verify when ownership or possession is transferred, further improving efficiency.
Blockchain Supply Chain Use Cases
Let’s take a look at a handful of companies already using blockchain-powered supply chain solutions.
FedEx
Shipping giant, FedEx, leverages blockchain technology to improve transparency in its supply chain, allowing itself, retailers, and suppliers to share tamper-proof records and track shipments. As a result, customers are able to track shipments, not only when they are in FedEx possession, but before and after they’ve been received. Blockchain’s secure chain of custody helps in settling customer disputes in FedEx and improve its efficiency in the shipping business.
Walmart
Being one of the leaders in the supply chain market, Walmart shows no signs of slowing down in cementing its leading position as it aims to use blockchain technology in improving its services. The company is piloting with many blockchain-based programs that were able to trace the origin of mangoes in the U.S. and track pork sold in its Chinese market.
One outstanding application of blockchain by the company comes from Walmart Canada. They developed an automated system for managing invoices from payments to its 70 third-party freights. The solution has helped the company to reduce disputed invoices from 70% to less than 1%.
DeBeers
Diamond company, DeBeers Group, uses blockchain to enable the traceability of diamonds in their supply chain journey from mine to cutter and polisher, through to a jeweller and the final consumers.
The solution combines blockchain technology and other emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in improving the diamond industry supply chain. The platform improves efficiency, visibility, and trust, enabling customers to have confidence that registered diamonds are natural and come from an ethical source.
Building Supply Chain Blockchain Solutions on QANplatorm
Though innovative and disruptive, many blockchains of today come with certain challenges that can potentially affect the future of supply chain solutions built on them.
QANplatform is a layer 1 hybrid blockchain that allows developers to build quantum-resistant supply chain blockchain use cases by leveraging its amazing capabilities.
A hybrid blockchain is best defined as a blockchain that attempts to use the best aspects of both private blockchain and public blockchain solutions. Most blockchains are either public or private. There is currently a lack of hybrid blockchain solutions, which is a must for facilitating enterprise mass adoption.
QANplatform employs a unique Lattice-based post-quantum cryptographic algorithm implemented in Go programming language to protect solutions built on its blockchain against the future attacks of quantum computers. NIST recommends CRYSTALS-Dilithium as the primary algorithm for quantum-resistant signatures — the one QANplatform has chosen before the standardisation process ended. QANplatform has already implemented CRYSTALS-Dilithium in the QAN TestNet in January 2022.
QANplatform also utilizes a Proof-of-Randomness (PoR) consensus mechanism that combines the best part of Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) to reach consensus in a sustainable and democratic manner. This enables automotive solutions built on its platform to function in a decentralized manner without posing threats to the environment. Moreover, anyone can become a validator in the network using a mobile phone or Raspberry Pi.
Additionally, QANplatform uses a unique Multi-language Smart-Contract Development Methodology that allows over 28 million developers to code in different Linux Kernel compatible languages of their choice; like C, C++, Java, TypeScript, Go, Rust, PHP, etc. This reduces the barrier of entry in building blockchain solutions and promotes ease of use for developers. Developers can quickly deploy QAN private blockchain on major cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure in under five minutes through QANplatform’s unique Rapid cloud platform deployment.
QANplatform further boosts the speed in adopting its platform for building supply chain solutions through integrations to the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), DevOps technologies (Docker, Kubernetes), Indexing and Oracle APIs (Chainlink, Band Protocol), and other major cloud platforms (Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean, or Linode, etc.).
Another interesting feature of QANplatform is the rewarding of developers after each new smart contract deployment and a royalty-based structure for each MainNet transaction where their code part is reused by other developers.
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About QANplatform:
QANplatform is the quantum-resistant Layer 1 hybrid blockchain platform that will allow developers and enterprises to build quantum-resistant: smart contracts, DApps, DeFi, DAO, NFT, tokens, Metaverse, and Web3 solutions on top of the QAN blockchain platform in any programming language.
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