Matthieu is also a board member of several digital startups, and a director of ALCCI (an association combating illicit trade). He explains the context and challenges of blockchain to us.<\/p>\n\n From a technological point of view, blockchain is a database associated with a protocol, which together create a secure, binding and auditable information-sharing network between different players. This property of making data “tamper-proof<\/strong>” comes from two things: the particular structure of the database (organised into “blocks”) and the distributed nature of this database. “Distributed<\/strong>” means that several copies of the database exist, synchronised by the blockchain protocol.<\/p>\n\n One key point is that all the security depends on how blockchain is distributed. If one player in a value chain or one technology player controls all the copies of a blockchain, then tamper-proof integrity is no longer guaranteed: in other words, you should never stop at the keyword “blockchain<\/strong>” and should always dig into the implementation details.<\/p>\n\n Blockchain secures information sharing between different players, even those who don’t know each other. This creates a kind of shared audit trail of exchanged data. In a product traceability context, this is obviously important: on the one hand, traceability becomes accessible in real time; on the other, it is auditable and past declarations are irrefutable. It is therefore a genuine form of collective and mutual security. Of course, this does not mean that the shared information is “true”: for that, it needs to be analysed.<\/p>\n\n Confidentiality is essential in a B2B product traceability context. It depends on what is written in the blockchain database and on encryption. In practice, for product traceability use, it is generally enough to record a data fingerprint in the blockchain rather than the data itself: in this case, confidentiality within the blockchain is total, since the fingerprint itself is not reversible.<\/p>\n\n We are facing a crisis of consumer trust: 75% of consumers no longer trust the products they consume, and more than 60% struggle to find their way through the multitude of different labels. Consumers want to know the products they consume, and want this information to be simple, solid and transparent: basically, the \u201cEU and non-EU origin\u201d mentions are no longer just absurd, they are becoming a credibility issue.<\/p>\n\n But this demand for transparency clashes in practice with the fact that brands and manufacturers generally do not have the information requested, due to the increasing fragmentation of their supply chain: there is in fact a direct link between the loss of trust, the lack of transparency and the absence of precise traceability throughout the product life cycle. It is this precise, real-time traceability that blockchain technology enables, at least in the implementation we carry out within the Tilkal platform.<\/p>\n\n In this sense, blockchain technology serves consumer trust: the technology itself is hidden, it is not the technology that reassures or builds trust, it is its (proper) use that resolves the dysfunctions behind the loss of trust.<\/p>\n\n In short, the issue is not the technology itself: the issue is that at the next recall of infant milk in France, it should take far less than 4 months for all stakeholders involved to remove all products from shelves. This is a concrete, operational issue, one that will allow for strong differentiation for the brands that embrace it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Blockchain is a tool that brings benefits to all players along the supply chain: immediate…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-544734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"matthieu](\"https:\/\/www.phytocontrol.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/matthieu-HUG.png\")
<\/figure>\n\nWhat is blockchain?<\/h3>\n\n
Security? Data confidentiality?<\/h3>\n\n
Does blockchain serve consumer trust?<\/h3>\n\n