Shopping cart with different food inside.

Ensuring transparency and authenticity on chain

How do you know for certain that the product you want to buy is authentic? With the immutable BSV blockchain, authenticity can be guaranteed.

The world is full of fakes, copies, and misleading products. We buy a designer bag, trusting that it is authentic, and hope that our extra virgin olive oil has not, in fact, been adulterated with cheaper, non-virgin oils. But how do we absolutely guarantee that the product we buy is the real deal?

If you go into the garden to pick an apple from a tree and eat it, you know that the apple you have selected is from that tree. But most of us are not able to wander outside and pick our own food. We need to trust that the food we buy in the shops comes from the region specified on the packet—or is the type of meat specified.

So how can we guarantee that the journey from farm to fork is true and that the food has not been tampered with on its path? The BSV blockchain can provide the guarantee that the original product has remained authentic throughout its journey—no matter how many intermediaries have been involved.

Bluefin Tuna is one of the most expensive fish in the world, costing over $200 per pound. If you were to pay this much for a fish, you would want to ensure that the fish you were buying came from a Bluefin Tuna fish. Making sure all of the stages from catching the fish itself, through its journey to the market, on to an intermediary dealer, and on into your hands were validated and authentic.

Authentic extra virgin olive oil is often cut with cheaper oils and sold as extra virgin olive oil. Practically indistinguishable in taste, it requires careful lab analysis to determine whether this product is the original unadulterated oil.

Manuka honey is often mixed with other honey types and sold for huge costs as pure Manuka honey. There are only enough New Zealand tea-tree bushes in the country to produce a few hundred tons of Manuka honey, yet over 10,000 tons of the product hit the consumer market. Honey is the world’s third most faked food. Traceability of the genuine article, sealed in New Zealand and exported in sealed jars, would make this product even more exclusive and profitable.

The BSV blockchain is well placed to offer full traceability and transparency. With unalterable records placed on-chain, the journey from the farm to your fork is traceable step by step. Its immutable ledger ensures that accurate, unmodifiable record-keeping can guarantee the product is authentic at every stage of its journey. Whether it is a prize lobster caught in Australia and destined for a wedding banquet in Shanghai, or a traceable piece of plastic that can be monitored from production through the consumer to recycling, everything is potentially traceable.

The blockchain records cannot be modified as the data stored within a block is authenticated with a time-stamped hash. If there is an attempt to modify any data, the time-stamped hash will update, showing the changes that have been made to the block. Therefore, there is a complete record of entries on-chain that can demonstrate that the data has not been altered or deleted.

But the need to have authenticity is not exclusive to the food industry. Any item that must be validated as authentic can be tracked through its lifecycle on the BSV blockchain. The art world is another example where authentic pieces of art can be tracked and authenticated through the use of a digital certificate or Non-Fungible Token (NFT). Every time ownership of the piece changes, the digital certificate is transferred to the new owner. Then a complete record of the item’s provenance can be kept.

There are many other scenarios that could store data on-chain so that a record of the data and transactions can be maintained in perpetuity. Any database could potentially transfer its data to the BSV blockchain and benefit from the immutable data ledger.

The benefit of an unalterable ledger means that traceability is possible, and data auditing can highlight where changes were made. And with your data stored on multiple copies of the blockchain stored on servers around the world, you no longer run the risk of a single point of failure destroying your business data.

Watch: The BSV Global Blockchain Convention presentation, Food Supply Chain & Blockchain

YouTube video

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