Distributed ledger technologies are transforming existing business models and business relationships. In particular, blockchain allows non-trusting parties to manage a shared database in a decentralized way and improve the transparency, authenticity, and reliability of the exchanged data. Nonetheless, decentralized paradigms are not yet well established, resulting in only a fraction of blockchain-based applications being successful in the long term.In this paper, we present a blockchain-based solution for the electric vehicle supply chain that we designed in the context of the CONCORDIA project of the European Cybersecurity Competence Network. We describe the goals, the value proposition, the main design choices, and the architecture of our system. Moreover, we discuss the electric vehicle supply chain, analyzing the improvements and limitations introduced by our blockchain-based solution. We analyze our solution from the managerial and technical points of view through a lean business methodology for blockchain solutions. In particular, we developed an economic impact assessment to evaluate the potential costs and revenues of the application of blockchain technology in a supply chain context. Although the blockchain system is inspired by the supply chain of a multinational automotive company, it can be applied to any other multi-actor supply chain.

Blockchain is a technology that creates trust among non-trusting parties without relying on any intermediaries. Consequently, it has attracted the interest of companies operating in a multitude of sectors. However, due to the number of different blockchain solutions that have emerged in the last few years and their rapid changes, it is challenging for such companies to orient their technological decisions. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the key dimensions—namely, governance, maturity, support, latency, privacy, interoperability, flexibility, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability—of some of the most-used permissioned blockchain platforms. Moreover, we present the results of a performance evaluation considering the following frameworks: Hyperledger Fabric 2.2, Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.2, and ConsenSys Quorum 21.1 (with both the GoQuorum client and the Hyperledger Besu client). The platforms were tested under similar conditions, and official releases were used, such that our findings provide a reference for companies establishing their technological orientation.

Logistics 4.0 is a revolution based on information sharing and digitalization. Thus, Logistics 4.0 leads to the generation of huge amounts of data in short periods, and the data bloating problem must be addressed. One possible solution is the interplanetary file system (IPFS), which guarantees data replication and availability while limiting the storage of overlapping data. This study is the first literature review on IPFS and focuses on its application to the logistic sector. The main findings of this study are: the topic is gaining interest, but the solutions proposed in the literature were still in the early stages; IPFS was always coupled with the blockchain technology, and all of the authors used similar strategies to integrate them; the authors identified many advantages in the use of IPFS, but did not analyze in-depth the related disadvantages.

The recent technological progress has started a revolution in the logistic and supply chain environment, known as Logistics 4.0. Such a revolution is strongly based on information sharing and digitalization. For this reason, distributed ledger technologies (and blockchain in particular) are attracting the interest of countries and companies. However, the proper verification of data coming from oracles is a huge issue. This paper proposes a solution integrating Blockchain and IoT, by exploiting the enhanced data security and integrity provided by Narrowband-IoT. A preliminary performance evaluation of Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperladger Sawtooth is also presented.

Blockchain is a disruptive technology that can be adopted in several business models. However, its applicability in the Supply Chain and in the context of the Logistics 4.0 and Smart Logistics revolution in particular, must still be proved from both an economic and an efficiency standpoint. This paper describes a Hyperledger Sawtooth-based framework for Supply Chain and Smart Logistics. The performance evaluation tests are performed on two Smart Logistics system settings. The results underline the performance decay of the system when concurrent transactions are submitted to multiple nodes.