The blockchain technology was established in the late 1990s but gained leverage in the past decade for its proven reliability in powering the cryptocurrency giant, Bitcoin. Blockchains have highly diverse security measures that offer benefits across multiple industries – most notably the retail and supply chain.
With dependence on digital platforms to store, secure, and share information, it is pertinent for businesses to find methods to prevent fraud and track the life cycle of a supply chain. For many, that means working with ASX blockchain companies to ensure that each product’s transactional history is appropriately recorded and untampered.
Non-Destructive Data Tracking
One of the most significant concerns of the retail industry is ensuring the authenticity of their products across the supply chain, especially in sectors that deal with high-value products.
The digital landscape has brought blessings upon data management and tracking, but it presents a single destructive flaw: the ability to edit and tamper with data. Even if a network is highly secured, system administrators can change data at any given time. While they often resort to this method for truthful circumstances, such as correcting mistakes, it opens a substantial risk for misinformation or rewriting the narrative of the supply chain.
For companies that deal with diamonds, leather goods, rare artifacts, and other expensive products, any case of fraud can have a domino effect across the board. Ideally, they would want to keep the issue out of consumers’ reach, which entails an intensive effort to track down mistakes before they ultimately make it to the receiving end of the market.
Blockchains do this best because they are essentially chains of information secured by hashes. The hash code from the previous block is a part of the next block, which means that any changes in the hash will invalidate all data. Furthermore, each hash code cannot be changed or edited. Instead, the creation of a new block is necessary to identify any changes and create a transactional record for the entire network to know.
Transparency Across All Networks
What makes blockchain technology unique is that it is essentially a public database wherein everyone across a network has access to each “block” of information. Upon the creation of a new block, the blockchain system distributes it to a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. As a result, every transaction falls under the scrutiny of a network of individuals. To a certain degree, it allows companies to maintain internal organisation throughout the supply chain, as everybody is aware of each step of the process. It acts similarly to a distributed ledger -- a highly inclusive and transparent distribution of the transactional sequence.
The peers – or nodes – need to reach a consensus before a particular block can enter a chain. As a result, nobody can fabricate or tamper with data as there are hundreds of people held accountable for a specific string of transactions. That is why plenty of ASX blockchain companies offer B2B services that aid companies on an organisational level. Its functions extend to industries beyond retail, including finance, law, and medicine.
With these preventative measures, companies can ward against hackers, frauds, and other powerful online attacks that can compromise the overall supply and transactional chain.
With the right security system, the retail industry is unlikely to face problems of the past and move towards optimised and digitally-forward processes. Shifting to blockchain technology is the first big leap toward contemporary data organisation and management, and it is likely to evolve even further in the coming years.
