Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
In September of this year, Li Jiaqi, the "lipstick brother", recommended a hairy crab called "Yangcheng No. 1 Scholar" in the live broadcast, calling it the authentic Yangcheng Lake hairy crab. In fact, the delivery place of "Yangcheng No. 1 Scholar" is not Yangcheng Lake, but Qingdao and other places. This "disguised household registration" hairy crab not only caused Li Jiaqi to lose many fans, but also became a hot search.
From melamine milk powder, hormone chicken, fake Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs, and Japanese Wagyu beef in the food safety field, to fake bags and shoes in the luxury goods field, and high imitation masks for skin care products... In recent years, "fake products" and "food safety" And other issues are frequently popped up. According to WTO statistics, the annual turnover of counterfeit and shoddy products has accounted for 10% of the world's total trade.
How to ensure food safety and buy authentic products is a big problem that people have been studying but still can't solve. The blockchain technology brings new hope for product traceability with its characteristics of information transparency, non-tampering, and traceability.
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How does blockchain realize product traceability
As early as 2003, the Chinese government made every effort to promote the construction of a food traceability system. It's just that the traditional traceability method adopts a centralized accounting model, and all links in the entire traceability chain are more susceptible to human factors.
For example, if you are a pig farmer and the consumer gets sick after eating your pork, the traceability will not end with you. Because there are too many parties involved from feeding to sales and then to the dining table, you will doubt: whether the pig feed you buy will be fake, whether the merchant who receives the pigs will be fake, whether the logistics will be fake, and whether the storage will be fake ?
In fact, dealers, distributors, agents, and processing plants are all likely to falsify. Because everyone uses a centralized bookkeeping method, the data and information of all parties are recorded in their own traceability system. Except for myself and the system provider, no other link knows. The risk of unreliability and tampering of the data filled in by all parties is greatly increased.
The decentralized distributed accounting method of the blockchain just solves the above problems.
Distributed accounting does not depend on an organization or individual, but on all parties to publicly record all information on the "public ledger". When any party related to the "public ledger" uploads data, other nodes will simultaneously record and store this information, supervise each other, and be completely open and transparent. In addition, the data written on the chain has a time stamp, which further increases the difficulty of counterfeiting.
This is how decentralization works: resolve the trust problem by removing the excess power of an institution.
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Typical landing scenarios: food, luxury goods, cosmetics
After the principle, when it comes to landing scenarios, consumer goods such as food and big-name products (mostly luxury goods and cosmetics) are the most concentrated in counterfeit products, and the blockchain is most needed.
Food is closely related to everyone, and it is also the most valued: Zhongan’s Bubu Chicken, JD.com’s beef on the chain, NetEase’s pork on the chain…
Among the two batches of 500 filing projects released by the Cyberspace Administration of China this year, 26 projects involved product anti-counterfeiting and traceability, accounting for 35% of the total number of filings. Among them, there are 5 projects focusing on food safety (agricultural products), far exceeding other categories such as branded products, jewelry and jade.
In October this year, the Suzhou Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision joined forces with the "Quality Chain" to "write Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs into the blockchain" and visualize the entire chain of data from the government to enterprises to consumers.
The Suzhou Bureau of Quality Supervision clearly stipulates that the official crab buckle will only be issued to 500 units that have obtained the right to use the geographical indication of Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs, so as to certify the real Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs and identify the main body responsible for quality. The circulation data of Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs in all links of circulation will be uploaded to the chain. Consumers can scan the code to verify the authenticity, and at the same time, verify whether the hairy crabs meet the standards by comparing the Yangcheng Lake hairy crab product standards and enterprise statements.
Typical products of cross-border e-commerce such as luxury goods and foreign brand-name cosmetics are all "hardest hit areas" for counterfeiting.
Take tens of thousands of pairs of trendy shoes this year as an example. In stock on the e-commerce platform "YOHO! BUY in stock" In order to combat counterfeiting, each pair of sneakers is affixed with an NFC label. Consumers only need to scan and identify the NFC chip to check the product online from unpacking to The whole process from identification to packaging.
Aiming at various counterfeiting phenomena that frequently occur in the cross-border e-commerce industry, SF’s blockchain traceability project “Fengsu” has built a whole-process traceability system based on the existing cross-border supply chain of overseas commodities to monitor commodity production, packaging, and logistics , warehousing, customs declaration, inspection declaration, sales, etc., and register the information on the chain so that consumers can check it.
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Ali, JD.com, Wal-Mart and other giants have entered the game
The blockchain traceability track not only has start-up companies such as traceability chain, VeChain, root, and smart chain, but also Internet giants such as Ali, Baidu, JD.com, Suning, and IBM have entered the game early.
In October 2016, Wal-Mart cooperated with IBM and Tsinghua University to use blockchain technology to track food and digitally record each link, thereby improving Wal-Mart's supply chain tracking capabilities in the Chinese market.
The relevant person in charge of Wal-Mart said: "Once there is a food safety scare or doubts about a certain product, it can be quickly traced back to its place of production to determine whether the food has been affected. If it is affected, it can be quickly traced. Make a decision quickly whether to conduct a recall."
Taking mangoes as an example, Wal-Mart's original supply chain tracking system took several days, sometimes even weeks, to complete the purchase record of a box of mangoes. But if the "tracking-recording" solution based on blockchain technology is applied, it only takes a few seconds to check the complete record of this box of mangoes.
In June 2017, JD.com announced the establishment of the "JD.com blockchain anti-counterfeiting and traceability open platform". As of May 2018, the platform has achieved full traceability of more than 1 billion key products of more than 11,000 types.
At the same time, Alibaba proposed the concept of "blockchain + agricultural products", allowing growers to directly supply agricultural products from the fields to urban tables through Alibaba's rural Taobao platform.
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Anti-counterfeiting cannot rely solely on the blockchain
Traceability is currently one of the most widely used areas of blockchain.
Although the blockchain can provide a new solution for product traceability and increase the difficulty and cost of manufacturing and selling fake and inferior products, it still faces the following problems:
The cost of data on-chain is temporarily higher than the traditional traceability method
At present, there is a shortage of blockchain talents, which leads to high costs behind the development and operation and maintenance of blockchain, which will push up the operating costs of various links in a short time. In addition, since all parties need to synchronize all data, the storage cost is theoretically increased, but this cost is almost negligible when the amount of information is not much.
The authenticity of off-chain information cannot be guaranteed
Before the information is uploaded to the chain, it is still mostly manual operation, and it is difficult to prevent the occurrence of errors or fraud. Asset ownership information can be divided into two steps: generation and transfer. The blockchain cannot guarantee the authenticity of the on-chain information. It can only guarantee that once it is on the chain, all parties can synchronize the information in time, and it cannot be tampered with during the transfer process.
In addition, the current blockchain traceability often relies on the QR code on the product packaging or built-in label, so the traceability is actually the label, not the product itself. If the product in the package is swapped in any link, it may still be mixed with fake products.
The essence of the above two problems is that it is difficult to connect the controllable online and the uncontrollable offline. Blockchain can use technology to solve the problem of online information flow, but the main position of trust scenarios is still offline, and technology alone cannot intervene.
Therefore, in order to ensure the authenticity of on-chain information, "Internet of Things + Blockchain", "Authoritative Node + Blockchain" (centralization + decentralization) are the main models in the future.
That is to say, in order to ensure the authenticity of the information on the chain, an authoritative organization is required to authenticate the authenticity and ownership of the assets before going to the chain, which is essentially a centralized step. It is foreseeable that the future will be in the form of centralized authentication + decentralized circulation. The traditional Quality Supervision Bureau, etc., are the so-called authoritative nodes.
In addition, there is a higher risk of fraudulent personal manual input of information. It is more reliable to use IoT devices such as sensors to read key data in the operation process and record them on the blockchain.
References:
References:
"Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs use blockchain for the first time, counterfeit products have nowhere to hide"
"Talking about the traceability of blockchain commodities"
"Inventory: Application Cases of Blockchain Commodity Traceability"
Further reading:
Further reading:
From birth to death, Zhongan "Step by Step Chicken" arranges the chicken's life clearly and clearly
What exactly can blockchain do? These 506 filing items tell you
