The involvement of blockchain certainly brings new opportunities to the supply chain - but the question is, what are the new opportunities?

The era of digital supply chain has arrived.

With AI, Big data, blockchain and other emerging technologies blooming in enterprises, it is becoming increasingly important to update the operation process to establish the supply chain initiative. In this article, we will first clarify the specific concept of blockchain and review the practical impact this technology has brought to the supply chain field in the past few years.

What is blockchain?

As the name suggests, blockchain is a chain composed of blocks. But unlike the gossip chain, digital information (blocks) is stored in public databases (chains). Every time new data is stored, the corresponding information is added to the chain in the form of blocks. In order to successfully complete this operation, the entire system needs to perform the following four steps:

1. Execute transactions - After conducting an online purchase operation, a single block will combine thousands of transactions together, meaning that a single purchase transaction will be packaged together with other users' transaction information in a new block.

2. Verify transactions - After the purchase, the computer network checks each transaction to ensure that the transaction content is consistent with the customer's statement. The entire confirmation process takes about a few seconds, involving information such as transaction time, amount, and transaction participants.

3. Store the transaction as a block - After verification is completed, the transaction will continue. All detailed information related to transactions will be stored in a single block, and thousands of similar other transactions will also be added.

4. Provide a hash value for the block - After verifying all transactions on the block, we need to assign it a unique identification number, which is the hash value. After this step is completed, the new block can be added to the blockchain.