The last few months have seen the emergence of several blockchain use cases in the B2B sector, notably in the aeronautics, agriculture, and industry sectors.
AERONAUTICS: BLOCKCHAIN DRIVES DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Thales, the European multinational specializing in products and services for the aerospace and defense industries, has decided to implement a new management system by integrating blockchain into its core system. Through the digital transformation of its production and maintenance center in Spain, the company wants to align itself with NATO and defense authorities’ standards for traceability. Thus “blockchain will be used to ensure the traceability of all parts and products processed in the production and maintenance center,” as the company announced. Indeed, it will now be possible to efficiently connect all the supply and product management processes. It is also planned that radio; aeronautical and naval equipment will be included. The new platform will also improve communication with customers as well as maintenance operations.
AGRICULTURE AND INDUSTRY: BLOCKCHAIN FOR PRODUCT TRACEABILITY
Bayer and the American blockchain specialist BlockApps announced on November 18 the launch of TraceHarvest, a blockchain solution open to all players in the agricultural sector to ensure the traceability of their products, even before the seeds are planted. Through this collaborative blockchain solution, Bayer intends to track the life cycle of agricultural products such as seeds – sale, exchange, sowing, harvesting, and processing – to set new standards for the sector.
In the automotive sector, Renault is currently deploying a blockchain to track and certify regulatory compliance of a vehicle’s components and subcomponents from design to production. This project, called XCEED, involves many stakeholders and should enable it to simplify access to this compliance data.
Remember that vehicles are made up of several thousand parts, each of which must meet different certifications and safety standards. When Renault needs to access the compliance status of a vehicle at a given moment, it can take several hours, or even days, to contact all the parties involved directly. So blockchain allows the European company to have more direct exchanges, almost in real-time…
BLOCKCHAIN AT THE SERVICE OF THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY
Another example of the application of blockchain and not the least: the circular economy.
The Suez group has just launched its first blockchain to facilitate the development of the circular economy using sewage sludge as an alternative to chemical and fossil inputs.
It is important to emphasize that sludge from wastewater treatment plants can also be valorized to avoid polluting fields with chemical and fossil inputs (pesticides, fertilizers, phytosanitary products…). Today, in Europe they replace the production of 6,000 tons of synthetic nitrogen and the mining of 8,000 tons of phosphorus. And to accelerate the development of this sector, which is necessary for the ecological transition of agriculture, the various players in the chain must be able to collaborate and ensure reliable traceability.
Thanks to blockchain, Suez wants to anticipate the regulatory context and align itself with the Circular Economy law and guarantee total transparency in the chain.
In concrete terms, how will it work? Suez plans to record all the transactions of sludge from wastewater treatment plants, from production to return to the ground. The blockchain will enable it to store and share data on the reuse of this waste.
As for farmers, an online portal, Sludge Advanced, is a “tool for managing their agricultural inputs, guaranteeing the quality of the sludge they spread. The key for the sector is to reduce “the carbon footprint of water treatment and agriculture”, as the company claims.
Looking at the current market and future trends for 2021, the benefits of blockchain are many:
- improve transparency
- strengthen traceability to limit the risk of fraud
- improve operational efficiency by sharing processes with less paper or emails
- automate processes in regulated or constrained environments
- It is therefore quite natural that the supply chain, finance, agriculture, health, trade and government sectors have taken up the subject.
*Ethereum is a decentralized exchange protocol that allows users to create smart contracts using a Turing-complete language. These smart contracts are based on a computer protocol that allows the verification or enforcement of a mutual contract.
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