In 2013, lasagnas sold throughout Europe tested positive for horsemeat. It took health authorities several weeks to trace the source of the problem, navigating a tangle of subcontractors, intermediaries, and paperwork scattered across multiple countries. Five years later in the United States, E. coli contamination in romaine lettuce triggered a massive recall. Lacking the ability to precisely identify the producers involved, the entire supply chain was paralyzed for several days. Representative of regularly-occuring crises in food supply chains, these episodes illustrate a structural reality: global supply chains suffer from a chronic lack of trust, with economic, health, and political consequences. This deficit is the logical outcome of a complexity that has become unmanageable by conventional tools. A global supply chain involves thousands of actors spread across multiple continents, subject to heterogeneous legal frameworks and each possessing a partial and fragmented view of the whole. In this environment, trust can no longer rely on personal knowledge or local reputation: it must be generated, documented, and verifiable on a large scale—something that traditional centralized systems have struggled to guarantee thus far. It is in this context that blockchain has emerged as a candidate for reshaping the information architecture of global supply chains. Based on a distributed and immutable ledger, it promises to provide instant traceability and verifiable authenticity without relying on a central third party. Therefore, the key questions are to what extent blockchain constitutes a credible response to the trust deficit in global supply chains, and under which conditions can its effectiveness be guaranteed. After characterizing the limitations of traditional traceability systems, the documented contributions of blockchain as a distributed trust infrastructure will be examined, before analyzing the obstacles and conditions of effectiveness that frame its scope.

‍

A lack of trust within contemporary supply chains

A structural complexity that generates opacity

Global supply chains represent some of the most complex economic architectures ever built, as they mobilize thousands of actors—producers, transporters, distributors, regulators—spread amongst several continents and obeying heterogenous legal frameworks (Shamsuzzoha et al., 2025). This extreme fragmentation brings about an often-underrated structural consequence: opacity. Each part of the chain only perceives a small portion of the global process, without any visibility on the upstream or downstream of these immediate transactions.

Nevertheless, this information asymmetry is not a matter of mere operational comfort but rather stands as a major and direct brake to the coordination and resiliency of supply chains. When an accident happens—whether it originates from food contamination, component defect, or logistics disruption—, lack of shared traceability considerably slows the collective answer down and broadens damages. Economic costs of this opacity are significant: counterfeiting annually accounts for hundreds of billions dollars globally, whereas product recalls for traceability issues provoke long and costly procedures for all stakeholders (Patel et al., 2025).

The pharmaceutical field is a striking example in this respect. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), counterfeit medications global market accounts for roughly $83 million alone with only deadly medications being taken into account. This underlines the magnitude of traceability defects in global supply chains in which a small error can cost lives (WHO, cited in Research Nester, 2024). These defects are not accidental but the direct result of an insufficient informational architecture, incapable of guaranteeing the authenticity and integrity of supply chain steps data.

The limitations of traditional traceability systems

In face of these risks, companies and regulators have developed several decades of traceability systems built on centralized databases and trusted third parties—auditors, certifiers, control organisms—that have for long been the norm. Nevertheless, their structural limitations become increasingly evident today.

The first problem is the vulnerability to falsification. A centralized ledger, whether held by a private company or a public authority, intrinsically constitutes a single point of failure: indeed, once compromised, all the transactional history can be affected without the other chain actors being informed about it (Shamsuzzoha et al., 2025). This frailty is all the more problematic as the incentives to falsify data—certificates of origin, health reports, customs documents—are particularly strong in chains where pressure on costs is intense (Wu et al., 2023).

The second problem is about information silos. In practice, traditional traceability systems are rarely interoperable: all actors maintain their own registers, in their own formats, according to their own standards. As a consequence, information circulates in a sequenced and partial way, following a model referred to as “one step up, one step back”: each operator only knows one’s direct supplier and customer (Kamath, 2018). As this model could prove convincing in short and local chains, its efficiency is actually limited when product traceability implies a journey reconstitution spread on multiple countries, multiple means of transport and multiple successive intermediaries.

Blockchain as a distributed trust infrastructure

Technological foundations and the logic of trust

To understand why blockchain arouses such a deep interest in the field of supply chains, it implies to grasp its fundamental logic—and to conceive it not as a common technology, but rather as a radically different trust architecture compared to existing systems. In its more purified definition blockchain consists in a distributed digital ledger, simultaneously shared by all the participants to a network, in which every transaction is chronologically saved, time-stamped, and cryptographically secured (Nakamoto, 2008, cited in Shamsuzzoha et al., 2025). Once saved, a data can nor be modified or deleted without the entire network being aware of it. This feature of immutability constitutes the core of the blockchain technology’s value proposition (Shamsuzzoha et al., 2025).

This architecture relies on a consensus mechanism: before a transaction is validated and added to the ledger, it has to be approved by a majority of the participating nodes, following predefined rules (Ma et al., 2024). This process erases the need for a central third—bank, auditor, certifier—to attest the veracity of an information. Trust is therefore not delegated to an institution anymore: it is encoded within the protocol itself (Shamsuzzoha et al., 2025). This is what is called by scholars “algorithmic trust” or a “trustless system", that is a system in which actors do not need to mutually trust each other to reliably interact (Patel et al., 2025).

This ledger logic is compounded by the smart contracts: digital autonomous programs automatically executing if predefined conditions are filled (Shamsuzzoha et al., 2025). In supply chains, they enable to automatically pay the supplier when the delivery is confirmed, or to block an expedition if required sanitary certifications are absent from the ledger (Shamsuzzoha et al., 2025). Smart contracts thus turn blockchain from a mere traceability tool into a genuine automation motor of contractual relations between supply chains’ actors.

Still, it is important to distinguish between two major blockchain architectures that imply different things for supply chains:

• Public blockchains (e.g., Ethereum): open to everyone, maximally decentralized, but poorly adapted to the confidentiality of sensitive commercial data.
• Private or consortium blockchains (e.g., Hyperledger Fabric, developed under the supervision of Linux Foundation, adopted by IBM or Walmart): by restricting the access to the network to identified and authorized participants, it offers a better governance control at the cost of a reduced decentralization (Hübschke et al., 2025).

This compromise between transparency and control is at the core of the structural dilemma that companies wishing to scale the technology have to face.‍

Documented benefits: traceability, authenticity, efficiency

Beyond its theoretical underpinnings, blockchain reveals its ability to build trust in supply chains through its concrete applications. Academic literature and available study cases highlight three main contributions: real-time traceability, authenticity certification, and operation efficiency gains.

The most documented case in terms of traceability are Walmart and IBM. Facing repeated critical food scandals and conventional systems’ incapacity to rapidly identify a contamination origin, Walmart launched two pilot projects in collaboration with IBM, based on Hyperledger Fabric. The first project concerns the traceability of pork sold in Chinese stores, while the second is about mangos commercialized in the United States (Kamath, 2018). The result is speaking: whereas on average seven days were needed to trace a product back to its original source using traditional paper systems, blockchain has reduced this time to 2.2 seconds (Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust, 2024). This gain is not merely a technical performance; it represents a qualitative transformation of the response capacity in a situation of sanitary crisis, with direct implications for consumer protection and economic loss limitation for the entire supply chain (Kamath, 2018).

In terms of authenticity, blockchain offers a response particularly adapted to sectors where counterfeiting and documentary fraud are major risks. In the pharmaceutical field, a DHL-Accenture joint project enabled the deployment of a blockchain-based serialization prototype in six distinct geographical areas, with the goal of securing the traceability of medicines between the different actors in the distribution chain and strengthening its credibility at each transfer point (Research Nester, 2024). In the jewelry sector, the Everledger platform uses the Ethereum blockchain to record the physical characteristics and provenance history of each diamond. It therefore creates a tamper-proof digital identity certificate that helps combat the trafficking of gemstones from conflict zones (Patel et al., 2025). In both cases, the blockchain fulfills the same function: making authenticity independently verifiable, without having to trust a single, potentially corruptible certifier.

Finally, operational efficiency gains constitute a third value vector. By automating reconciliation procedures between actors—customs documents, certificates validation, payment confirmation—smart contracts significantly reduce transaction times and costs in cross-border supply chains (Chod et al., 2020). In terms of international logistics, data silos between expeditors, transporters, customs and recipients create considerable inefficiencies. Conversely, blockchain, by offering a shared and in-real-time-updated ledger, enables a synchronization of all stakeholders without the need for a centralized unique platform.

A cross-cutting technology: sector overview

This ability to address the fundamental need for trust at great scale explains the rapid spread of blockchain amongst completely different fields. The following sector overview reveals a striking convergence around shared stakes of traceability, authenticity, and due diligence.

In the agri-food sector, the dynamic initiated by Walmart and IBM rapidly propagated to the rest of the industry. IBM Food Trust today regroups more than 300 suppliers and buyers accounting for millions of conditioned food products. Amongst them are found famous actors such as Nestlé and Unilever (Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust, 2024). The stake goes beyond mere logistics efficiency: it is about restoring consumer confidence in a context where food scandals have profoundly eroded the credibility of supply chains, and where the social demand for traceable and ethically sourced food continues to grow.

In the pharmaceutical sector, blockchain enables a digital passport for each batch of medicines, saving manufacturing, conditioning, and property transfer information at every step, making any substitution or falsification immediately detectable (Shamsuzzoha et al., 2025).

In the luxury goods and critical minerals industries, blockchain addresses a growing demand for due diligence related to human rights and the environment. The extraction of minerals such as cobalt, coltan, and diamonds in conflict zones has for years fueled opaque supply chains, within which forced labor and the financing of armed groups remain difficult to trace and document. Blockchain offers companies a tool for continuous and tamper-proof documentation of the origin of their raw materials, enabling them to both meet the increasing regulatory requirements—particularly those of the European Union’s Duty of Vigilance Regulation—and to demonstrate their commitment to social responsibility to their customers (Hübschke et al., 2025).

This overview highlights the structural reality that whatever the industry considered, the deployment of blockchain in supply chains always responds to the same challenge: transforming a trust that has hitherto been declarative and unverifiable into a trust that is documented, distributed, and auditable in real time.

Technical and economic constraints

While blockchain offers a theoretically compelling added value, its deployment within industrial environments clashes with a bundle of technical and economic constraints. Recent academic literature converges on this point: the distance between the technological pledge and the operational reality remains significant, and the conditions for a successful adoption are far from being gathered (Hübschke et al., 2025).

The first constraint is one of scalability. Public blockchains based on energy-intensive consensus mechanisms such as the « proof of work » struggle to treat transaction volumes comparable to those of existing centralized systems, creating prohibitive validation times and transaction costs if implemented on a large scale (Hübschke et al., 2025). In parallel, while private or consortium blockchains partially address this issue by reducing the number of participating nodes, they do it at the expense of a smaller decentralization. It thus weakens the very feature that constitutes the main comparative advantage relative to the traditional centralized databases (Hübschke et al., 2025). This tension between performance and decentralization remains until now one of the most difficult technical challenges to solve for industrial blockchains architects.

The second constraint is one of interoperability. Blockchain solutions deployed in supply chains are profoundly heterogenous. They therefore reproduce at the blockchain scale the issue of information silos that they were intended to resolve (Hübschke et al., 2025). As interoperability standards do not exist, an actor dealing with commercial partners using different platforms faces a practical impossibility to make information smoothly circulate throughout the supply chain, thereby limiting the real magnitude of traceability (Wu et al., 2023).

The third constraint—and probably the most fundamental in conceptual terms—is what computer scientists summarize with the expression « garbage in, garbage out ». It refers to the fact that blockchain guarantees data integrity and immutability once it is saved in the shared ledger; it does not guarantee their veracity at the source in any way (Shamsuzzoha et al., 2025). In this logic, if a malicious or negligent actor records erroneous information—a false harvest date, a false health certificate, a false declaration of origin—this data will be stored and disseminated with the same apparent reliability as accurate information (Kouhizadeh et al., 2021). Thus, blockchain displaces the trust issue without entirely solving it: it secures the transmission canal but leaves the production reliability issue intact. In fine, it sends back to human, institutional, and regulatory control mechanisms that technology alone cannot replace (Patel et al., 2025).

These technological constraints are compounded by significant economic barriers. The deployment cost of a blockchain-based solution is significant. As these amounts are accessible to major brands such as Walmart or Nestlé, they represent obstacles—often prohibitive—for small and medium-sized enterprises, which nevertheless constitute the majority of actors in global supply chains, particularly in developing countries (Hübschke et al., 2025). This economic asymmetry risks reproducing a paradoxical effect: a blockchain deployed solely by the major actors in a chain, de facto excluding the weakest links—often those most exposed to fraud risk and least able to defend themselves—thus reproducing structural inequalities under the guise of technological innovation.

Organizational and institutional obstacles

Beyond technical constraints, the most persistent obstacles to blockchain adoption in supply chains are organizational and institutional. To explain the low adoption rate observed worldwide, human and political barriers are at least as significant as technological barriers (Kouhizadeh et al., 2021).

The first organizational obstacle is the asymmetry of adoption. A blockchain is only valuable if all the supply chain’s actors participate: a shared ledger that only covers part of the chain is potentially more dangerous than no traceability at all, as it can create an illusion of transparency without offering the real guarantees it should come with. However, convincing all suppliers—including tier 2 and 3 subcontractors, often located in countries with weak digital infrastructure—to adopt a shared platform happens to be extremely difficult in practice, especially when these actors perceive adoption as a cost without direct benefit for themselves.

The second obstacle is the strategic resistance of dominant players. For many companies, their supply chain’s opacity is not a defect to eliminate but a competitive advantage to preserve: the non-disclosure of their suppliers, margins, or sourcing practices constitutes a barrier to entry that the transparency brought about by blockchain would directly threaten (Chod et al., 2020). This resistance is particularly important in industries where sourcing practices are likely to attract social or environmental criticism—textile industry, mining, industrial food processing—and regulatory pressure remains insufficient to overcome reluctance (Guo et al., 2020).

The third obstacle is the absence of shared sectoral standards and clear international legal frameworks. Under current law, the evidentiary value of a blockchain record varies considerably from one jurisdiction to another: some countries explicitly recognize smart contracts as legally binding, while others maintain requirements for written form or handwritten signatures that are incompatible with blockchain logic (Hübschke et al., 2025). This legal uncertainty discourages investment and complicates cross-border deployments, precisely in contexts where blockchain has the most to offer. In terms of technical standards, the absence of an authoritative international organization—comparable to what International Organization for Standardization (ISO) represents in other fields—leaves room for a proliferation of incompatible proprietary protocols, to the detriment of the systemic interoperability that is essential for adoption at scale (Hübschke et al., 2025).

Conceptual tensions: transparency versus confidentiality

The third category of limits is about a more fundamental order, as it touches a conceptual tension inherent to the proposition of blockchain itself that neither technical upgrades or institutional reforms can entirely solve. This tension opposes two equally legitimate requirements structurally hard to conciliate: transparency, that is the condition for trust, and confidentiality, that is the condition to competitiveness (Hübschke et al., 2025).

In the context of supply chains, total transparency—which is the theoretical ideal of the public blockchain—would mean that all of a company’s transactional data; including its purchase prices, margins, strategic suppliers, and order volumes, would be accessible to all network participants, including its direct competitors (Shamsuzzoha et al., 2025). This perspective is unacceptable for a majority of economic actors, which explains the almost systemic use of private or consortium blockchains in industrial deployments (Hübschke et al., 2025). However, by restricting access to the ledger, these architectures precisely recreate the logics of centralized control and governance by a dominant actor—often the chain’s main order-giver—that the blockchain was supposed to overcome (Patel et al., 2025).

Some technical responses are emerging to resolve this tension without dissolving it entirely. The « zero-knowledge proof » (ZKP) allows actors to mathematically prove that an information is true without revealing its content. A company can thus demonstrate that its suppliers are certified conform to an environmental standard without having to disclose their identity or the commercial conditions of their relation (Hübschke et al., 2025). Cross-chain architectures—enabling distinct blockchains to communicate secure information using « bridge » mechanisms—offer a way towards interoperability without ledger fusion, preserving the informational sovereignty of every network (Hübschke et al., 2025). While these innovations are promising, they add a new layer of technical complexity that further slows down the adoption cycles in organizations whose digital capacities are often limited (Kouhizadeh et al., 2021).

‍

Conclusion: Towards digital trust governance in supply chains

As a conclusion, blockchain presents itself as a structured response to an ancient issue: the trust deficit weakening global supply chains. This article measured its real magnitude while acknowledging its too-often underestimated limits. The benefits of the technology are undeniable: by substituting a shared and immutable ledger to failing traditional systems, it makes traceability verifiable, authenticity documentable, contractual relations automatized at an unprecedented scale. However, what the technology cannot accomplish alone is as clear, as it does not guarantee the veracity of data, nor does it overcome organizational resistance of actors whose interest is opacity. Likewise, it does not address by itself power asymmetries between small and big suppliers, and only produces real value when existing within a consistent ecosystem—technological, institutional, and regulatory—that neither the market nor the technology can spontaneously bring.

Therefore, blockchain is a credible response to the trust deficit in global supply chains but this credibility is conditional. It indeed depends on governance, standardization, and regulation choices that ultimately are political decisions. In this logic, this may be the most stimulating opening this article glimpses: as supply chains have become again a matter of power and sovereignty for States, the question of trust within worldwide exchanges stops being a purely and merely technical or commercial one. It becomes a question of global common good, and as such, an intellectual and political project that remains largely open.