Blockchain for traceability - Useful but subject to conditions

Invented in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym behind which still lurks a great unknown (or several), blockchain technology quickly became well-known and popular thanks to the adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Beyond its financial use, the appearance of smart contracts in 2015 opened up new, high-potential use cases for companies, particularly in industry, on subjects such as supply chain and traceability. As a result, numerous articles have appeared on the web describing blockchain as a revolutionary technology.

However, in 2024, we're still waiting to see its concrete application massively spread on the market. Although the ideas and ambitions propagated at the outset are still valid, the initial enthusiasm for this technology no longer seems the same. Is it just an impression or a reality? Has the technology shown its limits? That's what we're going to examine in this article, focusing in particular on the theme of traceability, a term we'll start by defining.

We'll then take a brief look at what blockchain technology is, and more broadly at distributed ledger technology, how it works and why people are so interested in it.

Now that the technical foundations have been laid, it's up to us to examine whether a lasting marriage is possible. Since there are so many traceability business use cases, especially if we break them down by industry, it would be redundant to attempt to list them all. Instead, we're going to analyze them by grouping them into three categories distinguished by different uses of distributed ledger technology: certified data and reliable audit trails, collaborative data and cryptoassets.

Finally, we will compare these expected benefits with the reality on the ground and the constraints to be taken into account before launching a project, which may explain the relatively slow adoption of blockchain and some past failures.