Blockchain Technology

Blockchain is one of the most popular and controversial topics of conversation among technology leaders in business today. Blockchain is a digital ledger of economic transactions that is fully public, continually updated by countless users, and considered by many impossible to corrupt through its use of continuous records in blocks. A blockchain database contains two types of records: transactions and blocks. Blocks hold batches of transactions and the blocks are time stamped, linking to a previous block. The transactions cannot be altered retroactively and it is also possible to program the blockchain to record transactions automatically.

Blockchain can offer the manufacturing industry better supply chain management, smart contract platforms, digital currencies, and tighter cybersecurity. For example, growers, suppliers, processors, distributors, retailers, regulators, and consumers could potentially gain permissioned access about the origin and state of food in their transactions, and more easily trace contaminated foods to their source.

A big question is if or how fast manufacturers will adopt and implement blockchain. Manufacturers may need to update IT processes before they can consider using blockchain, and that could have a lot of cost associated with it. However, if consumers start to demand more transparency from products they buy, manufacturers may have to implement blockchain to meet that demand.

If you want to check out blockchain a little more, there are some blockchain platforms out there already in use – Blockchain Foundry, BigchainDB, Chain, and IBM Blockchain (IBM’s website link: https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/).