Entrust, Australia’s first full-service agricultural supply chain platform, has announced it will operate on Hedera Hashgraph, the enterprise-grade distributed ledger.

Entrust was launched on Sunday by South Australian Premier Steven Marshall. It has an initial focus on securing supply chain growth and trust in the high-value wine and dairy manufacturing industries.

Entrust allows producers to capture and map the movement of primary products in the agricultural process and then track the secondary manufactured products along supply chains. It does this by combining geolocation, time-stamping and the transparent immutable storage of key events. Hedera Hashgraph is a very fast, secure and decentralised public network that offers better speed and security than first-generation blockchains.

Entrust’s Technical Director, Rob Allen, says partnering with Hedera was an obvious choice, and will allow the company to scale its beta platform and take the trusted winegrape data service to other wine producing nations and other agricultural commodities.

Entrust allows producers to capture and map the movement of primary products in the agricultural process and then track the secondary manufactured products along supply chains. It does this by combining geolocation, time-stamping and the transparent immutable storage of key events. Hedera Hashgraph is a very fast, secure and decentralised public network that offers better speed and security than first-generation blockchains.

“Owned and governed by supply chain heavyweights including IBM, LGE and Boeing, Hedera gives us immediate recognition globally and provides our customers with confidence that they are working with established distributed ledger players. The platform will also scale with us as we expand into other agricultural verticals.”

Hedera CEO, Mance Harmon, commended Entrust for the transparency and accountability it is bringing to food supply.

“Entrust’s successful initial pilot with the wine industry, and strong early demand from other agricultural sectors, demonstrates the pent-up desire by producers and consumers to have more visibility into the provenance and lifecycle of our food and drinks,” Mr. Harmon says.

“We are pleased to be working closely with Rob and the team on such an important project, which highlights the visibility and trust that only a robust public distributed ledger can bring to an industry that affects us all.”

ABOUT ENTRUST AND HEDERA’S DISTRIBUTED LEDGER TECHNOLOGY (DLT)

Entrust is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that immutably records encrypted data of important agriculture supply chain information. Entrust operates on a cloud-based platform that is accessed either via a website or a mobile app.

Using mobile phones with in-built GPS geolocation, Entrust allows producers to simplify record keeping and reduce their compliance costs (such as meeting their Wine Australia Label Integrity Program obligations) while at the same time, virtually eliminating the chances of fraud.

Entrust uses the Hedera Hashgraph public distributed ledger network to record key information. The hashgraph is not a blockchain, instead it uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (or DAG) structure. Blockchains suffer from what is known as the ‘trilemma’; an inherent trade-off between speed, security and decentralisation, which prevents them from increasing in speed and throughput securely. Public blockchains consume vast amounts of energy to provide computer power to maintain network security. Hedera Hashgraph does not have these constraints and is therefore ideal as a platform that can conduct many thousands of transactions per second while keeping commercial data secure, at a fraction of the energy and commercial cost.

Hedera is owned and governed by a council of global innovators, which currently includes Avery Dennison, Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, FIS, Google, IBM, LG Electronics, Magalu, Nomura, Swirlds, Tata Communications, University College London, Wipro, and Zain Group.