In the past decade, consumer behavior has shifted to make knowledge of the origin of a product a competitive advantage. Not only does a supply chain become a way to operate efficiently, but also presents data to better prove the authenticity of a cow, a crop, a carton of milk, or a bottle of wine. Furthermore, businesses are being challenged by competitors selling fraudulent products claiming, for instance, that milk, ice cream, or wine came from a more desirable region to co-opt the market at a lower, but deceptive price.

Datahash set out to put an end to fraud by providing a robust platform for trusted agriculture supply chain information. The company started with the goal of helping to solve the estimated $3 billion annual global wine fraud by demonstrating the integrity of a bottle from grape to glass – this solution continues to evolve with industry participants using the Datahash Wine Beta platform. In 2021 Datahash expanded into the dairy industry and is currently trialing the Dairy Alpha platform.

Blockchain, or distributed ledger technology (DLT), are necessary for achieving a higher level of data integrity than is possible with a centralized database. With DLT, participants in a supply chain can agree on shared data without knowing or trusting the other party, and third parties, including regulators, retailers, and consumers, are more readily able to understand and trust the contextual information has not been tampered with, for example, who sent the data and when it was sent.

Datahash is focused on codes-of-trade, future intergovernmental ledgers, open attestation, and trade modernization. Datahash chose Hedera as the public ledger to build on knowing it needed to establish this level of integrity from the beginning while also wanting to achieve a low-cost and high-performance solution, the latency of which had to be low enough to not interfere with someone entering the information in the field.

To lower operating costs and act as a neutral, decentralized infrastructure the team logs supply chain events using the Hedera Consensus Service with each update immutably recorded to a defined topic on Hedera. Each event sent to Hedera requires a signature and receives a consensus timestamp, allowing for Datahash to provide a complete history of the supply chain to those with appropriate permissions.

At the time of this writing, Datahash continues to trial the Wine Beta and Dairy Alpha solutions, and as the platform matures it aims to solve problems in adjacent agricultural verticals.