Hello,
I am writing my master’s thesis at the moment. My topic revolves around supply chain management, Life Cycle Inventory (ecological footprint of a product) and blockchain.
One of my tasks is to find out if the structure of a supply chain can be retrieved by the financial transactions of companies on the blockchain.
The reason behind it is that the most of the companies get their data to calculate the ecological footprint only from tier1 suppliers, which means direct suppliers. But in most cases the suppliers also have suppliers (tier2) and so on. The data that companies can not easily retrieve, they take from a database like ecoinvent, where the data is categorized. If two companies make similar products, it is likely that the tier2 and tier3 data comes from a database, which makes it hard to compare the ecological footprints of these products. This is why the quality of this data is sometimes not very high.
My scenario is the following:
Company C buys Metal from its supplier Company A. Company C sends a financial transaction with a stable coin to A and in return gets information about the ecological footprint of the product in form of a ipfshash. Can this be done in one transaction, so it would be maybe easier to retrieve the data from the network later or what do you think how this could be done the best way?
(Also in the best case the data should be encrypted homomorphically, because that data is most likely confidential and it has to be possible to calculate the ecological footprint out of it. Moreover another competitor could extract information out of the transaction and have an advantage. I found the Microsoft SEAL library, however they only support single-key homomorphic encryption, which wouldn’t be of much use, because then all the companies would have to use the same secret key to encrypt the message. I found a paper in which multi-key homomorphic encryption is discussed which would solve the issue, but it is only a proof of concept. But this is not priority number one for now.)
Thank you,
Max