A Seafood Supply Chain Application Built on European Blockchain Services Infrastructure

Existing blockchain-based supply chain applications face challenges such as governance conflicts, regulatory misalignment, and interoperability gaps, which limit their effectiveness and applicability. The European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI) has been proposed as a generic blockchain infrastructure to address these issues. However, there is a lack of demonstration and evaluation of EBSI in the supply chain domain. This study presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a seafood supply chain application, specifically for Norwegian king crab, utilizing the features of EBSI. We apply W3C standard verifiable credentials, eIDAS-compliant signatures, qualified timestamping for legal trust, and EBSI’s comprehensive track and trace capabilities to document the complete history of seafood products throughout the supply chain. The purpose is to address the unique challenges of the seafood supply chain, which require immutable traceability, regulatory compliance across jurisdictions, and multi-stakeholder collaboration, including small-scale partners. Our evaluation and comparative analysis with state-of-the-art blockchain-based supply chain applications highlights four key advantages of the EBSI-based supply chain application, including comprehensive documentation generation to support regulatory compliance with EU seafood traceability frameworks cost-effective participation for small-scale stakeholders through zero transaction fees, tamper-proof verification of supply chain information through W3C credentials, and neutral governance preventing conflicts of interest among stakeholders. The study also reveals that integrating EBSI-based applications with legacy supply chain systems could be challenging and requires further investigation.