This is a drum I’ve been beating for many years now - In my opinion using decentralized networks to create trusted and controlled visibility into the supply chains that literally affect the lives of billions of people every day is inevitable; but we are not there yet…. In this post I summarize my latest thinking on the topic.
TLDR – Digital twins are for running simulations and optimizing for future events. Product tokens are for transferring claims against an asset (ownership, custody, etc) and recording the state of past events.
Often the topic of AI regarding blockchain comes up, often the topic is misguided…
A blockchain is not a learning system, it is not intelligent (smart contracts aren’t even that smart…). It’s more akin to a data historian, a network that maintains a state, and a record of all previous states. It does not adapt on its own or self optimize - if it did it would undermine the trusted execution.
TLDR; attested sensors can be used to digitally sign source data at the moment it is collected by a IOT device. Blockchain can be used to notarize that signature and apply a tamper proof time stamp. To protect sensitive data from leaving the source, a zero knowledge_ circuit can be used to produce a synthesis of the raw data and generate a proof that the synthesis was done correctly.
Where is most of the effort going to be for enterprises to get on board with product tokenization for track & trace? It’s not the blockchain tech - while that part is cool, if we go with the assumption that any decentralized system worth building on needs to be open source and multi-purpose, it’s not going to be the enterprise’s role to develop or operate that network. It is however the enterprise’s role to lay out clear business requirements that can be used to build modular software (building blocks) to achieve lofty traceability-related use cases.
With product tokens we generate a bread crumb trail of metadata that is specific to a given product. In combination with the minting, transferring, and burning of claims on that token the metadata rounds out the full record of the products lineage and data.