SBHack 2019 - Team 18

Supply Chain ID

Challenge

CBD.ID tackles the challenge of creating a solution for traceability and authentication of medical products for the Supply Chain vertical. There are multiple projects working with blockchain technology in supply chain management, however, there are few case scenarios utilizing GS1 standards and applying those to the fast-growing CBD industry.

CBD is called “the antibiotics of the 21st century”, yet there is a lack of established trust between retailers and consumers. The CBD retail market is in the beginning of legal regulations with a less mature value chain, thus there is a space to utilize GS1 standards and have an alternative way of supply chain orchestration from producer to a final consumer.

Solution

Enabling seamless information sharing will help to build accountability for newly established retailers and as such improve their sales. Although there are political, legal and technological risks, the idea was highly welcomed by potential customers.

Overview

The goal is to create a solution to the logistical problem of the traceability and authentication of unique products. To achieve this we focused on a short and practical approach, after contemplating the feasibility of putting the GS1 standard into the form of multiple smart contracts, which could be updated on e.g handovers. Skipping options that were to big to tackle in the short period of the hackathon we agreed on enshuring traceability by just pushing the standard in form of JSON directly to the chain. This approach might be most useful in a consortium chain where the participants are selected to prevent unwanted modification.


Technical Approach

In leiu of, and in preparation for, Ethereum being available on AWS Managed Blockchain, we have recreated the results of the simple one-click deploy.

Blockchain

Our solution is a private Ethereum instance Parity running on EC2 inside of a VPC. The Security Group rules of the VPC allow for communication only on the WebSockets RPC port between the Ethereum instance and Elastic Beanstalk. This is done via the official web3 SDK.

API

The auto scaling Elastic Beanstalk setup uses the Node.js stack and serves the REST API endpoints, the static resources for the web/mobile application, and a pseudo-realtime feed of data on the blockchain.

Ingestion Proxy

The API handles ingestion of the GS1 event data, writing it to the blockchain as a transaction data payload. A future version could instead convert the raw data to a "GS1 Smart Contract" deployment, opening the possibility for more 'active' data model objects.

Interoperability

We chose the Ethereum protocol because of its wide adoption as a public blockchain and the security and features it offers a private or consortium based solution. The availability of tools and talent, and the commitments of the existing global technical community to its future development, make it the highest value, lowest risk option.

Future

We confirmed with the AWS team that our configuration can be written as a Cloud Formation yaml file for easier automated deployments

AWS Stack

  • EC2, running Ethereum inside VPC
  • Elastic Beanstalk, Node.js load balanced
  • React App

Conclusion

The main value for creating CBD.ID is to help customers level up their value chain strategy by integrating blockchain & GS1 standards in to their supply chain.


MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.