The EBC team sat down last week with Csilla Zsigri, VP Strategy at BTP to discuss provenance in blockchain and the opportunities around it.
What is provenance in blockchain? Why is the provenance of products important and how does it create value for its users?
Simply put, provenance captures the origin and life journey of a digital or physical asset. By recording it on a distributed ledger — e.g. blockchain — provenance information becomes more trustworthy, and its management is more efficient.
The ability to record and share reliable provenance information allows individuals and organizations to verify the origin of their assets and track their journey — including their ownership history. Verified provenance not only proves the authenticity, but may also increase the value of an asset.
When applied to supply chains, this capability heightens transparency, which makes them more efficient and resilient. This increased transparency also improves customer and partner loyalty and trust.
By using a blockchain-backed provenance solution, fraud, contaminations, and counterfeits can be quickly flagged in order to ensure consumer safety, while saving costs. Businesses can also demonstrate that their product is environmentally friendly, and that it was produced in a socially and ethically responsible way.
What industries will benefit the most from blockchain-backed provenance solutions?
Having the ability to verify the origin and track the journey of an asset — incl. its ownership history — in a trusted and efficient way, can translate into immense value in a wide range of industries — energy, healthcare, retail, and creative industries, just to mention a few.
Tell us about your new provenance solution, Chronicle and where can we find out more about Chronicle?
Chronicle is a domain-agnostic solution for immutably recording provenance data. It is built on the World Wide Web Consortium’s open-source PROV Ontology (PROV-O) specification, and uses GraphQL as its query language.
It records provenance information of any physical or digital asset on a distributed ledger. It is now available with Hyperledger Sawtooth as its default backing ledger, with support for other industry-leading distributed ledgers in the pipeline. It is powered by our blockchain management and operations platform, Sextant, to facilitate its deployment and ongoing management, as well its integration with enterprise systems.
As for the second part of the question, a great place to start is my blog post Introducing Chronicle: Blockchain-Backed Provenance which was published as part of the launch of Chronicle at EBC 22.
Can you share any specific success deployment stories with Chronicle?
Chronicle is being successfully used in an art-related project, and we are about to kick off a couple of projects in the energy and financial sectors.
Could Chronicle as a blockchain-backed provenance solution encounter any regulatory challenges in the near future?
Let’s flip this around. We believe that blockchain-backed provenance is an area of interest for the regulatory technology (aka regtech) space, as it can be applied to a number of legal and regulatory compliance and risk management use cases.
About BTP
BTP is an enterprise blockchain company, with a mission to bring the benefits of distributed ledgers, smart contracts, information security, and provenance to business. BTP delivers the fundamental building blocks for multipart innovation, ultimately enabling digital collaboration that is decentralized, efficient, and trustworthy. BTP is headquartered in Edinburg, and has a presence in Barcelona, London, New York and San Francisco.
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