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Blockchain technology in current agricultural systems: from techniques to applications
journal contribution
posted on 2020-08-07, 08:31 authored by Weijun Lin, Xinghong Huang, Hui FangHui Fang, Victoria Wang, Yining Hua, Jingjie Wang, Haining Yin, Dewei Yi, Laihung YauIncreasingly, blockchain technology is attracting significant attentions in various agricultural
applications. These applications could satisfy the diverse needs in the ecosystem of agricultural products,
e.g., increasing transparency of food safety and IoT based food quality control, provenance traceability,
improvement of contract exchanges, and transactions efficiency. As multiple untrusted parties, including
small-scale farmers, food processors, logistic companies, distributors and retailers, are involved into the
complex farm-to-fork pipeline, it becomes vital to achieve optimal trade-off between efficiency and integrity
of the agricultural management systems as required in contexts. In this paper, we provide a survey to
study both techniques and applications of blockchain technology used in the agricultural sector. First,
the technical elements, including data structure, cryptographic methods, and consensus mechanisms are
explained in detail. Secondly, the existing agricultural blockchain applications are categorized and reviewed
to demonstrate the use of the blockchain techniques. In addition, the popular platforms and smart contract
are provided to show how practitioners use them to develop these agricultural applications. Thirdly, we
identify the key challenges in many prospective agricultural systems, and discuss the efforts and potential
solutions to tackle these problems. Further, we conduct an improved food supply chain in the post COVID19 pandemic economy as an illustration to demonstrate an effective use of blockchain technology.
Funding
Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangdong, China under Grant 201903010105
Philosophy and Social Science 13th Five-Year Planning Project of Guangzhou, China under Grant 2018GZZK23
History
School
- Science
Department
- Computer Science
Published in
IEEE AccessVolume
8Pages
143920 - 143937Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The authorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by IEEE under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Publication date
2020-08-05Copyright date
2020eISSN
2169-3536Publisher version
Language
- en