Business and Social Sciences
Business and social sciences | Online ISSN 3067-8919
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Volume 1 Number 1 2023
RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)
Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology for Supply Chain Authenticity, Accountability, and Resilience: A Literature-Based Framework
Md. Fazle Alahi Bhuiyan 1*, Md. Nazmul Haque 2
Business and Social Sciences 1 (1) 1-10 https://doi.org/10.25163/business.1110841
Submitted: 30 January 2023 Revised: 05 April 2023 Accepted: 11 April 2023 Published: 13 April 2023
Abstract
Background: Modern supply chains stretch across borders, institutions, and information systems, and this fragmentation makes it genuinely hard for any single stakeholder to verify where a product came from, who touched it, and why a disruption happened. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is often proposed as a fix, though the enthusiasm surrounding it has, at times, outpaced the evidence.
Methods: This paper undertakes a structured narrative synthesis of peer-reviewed literature (2017–2022) on DLT-enabled supply chains, organizing findings around three interlocking outcomes — authenticity, accountability, and operational resilience — and examining how blockchain, IoT, smart contracts, and governance mechanisms interact within them.
Results: DLT strengthens traceability and auditability by giving participants a shared, tamper-evident record, and its pairing with IoT and smart contracts can meaningfully cut coordination delays. Yet these gains are conditional: they depend on data quality at the point of entry, on governance arrangements that were agreed before deployment, and on how convincingly the physical world is bound to its digital record. Interoperability gaps, scalability ceilings, privacy trade-offs, and the absence of shared performance metrics remain unresolved.
Conclusion: DLT is best understood not as a self-sufficient technical fix but as one component of a socio-technical system — its value depends on the standards, incentives, and institutional discipline built around it.
Keywords: Distributed Ledger Technology; Blockchain; Supply Chain Traceability; Smart Contracts; Operational Resilience
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