Australian agri supply chain platform partners with Hedera Hashgraph

Entrust, an Australian government-backed agricultural supply chain platform, has announced its partnership with Hedera Hashgraph, an enterprise-grade distributed platform claiming to offer better speed and security than first-generation blockchains.

Using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure, the hashgraph essentially provides the same benefits of the blockchain without the drawbacks of its ‘trilemma’: an inherent trade-off between speed, security and decentralisation, which prevents them from increasing in speed and throughput securely.

The Entrust platform was officially launched on Sunday, September 20, by South Australian Premier Steven Marshall, with the primary goal of securing supply chain growth and trust in the high-value wine and dairy manufacturing industries.

The platform is designed to help producers monitor the flow of their products as raw materials until they are manufactured as secondary products along supply chains, thus preventing fraud.

To achieve this, it will combine geolocation, time-stamping and the storage of vital information on a transparent immutable ledger.

Rob Allen, Entrust’s Technical Director, describes the partnership with Hedera as an “obvious choice”, claiming that this will allow the company to scale its beta platform and expand its data service to other wine-producing nations and other agricultural commodities.

“Owned and governed by supply chain heavyweights including IBM, LGE and Boeing, Hedera gives us immediate recognition globally and provides our customers with confidence that they are working with established distributed ledger players. The platform will also scale with us as we expand into other agricultural verticals,” Allen said.

Mance Harmon, Hedera CEO, likewise praised Entrust for delivering transparency and accountability to the food supply chain. “Entrust’s successful initial pilot with the wine industry, and strong early demand from other agricultural sectors, demonstrates the pent-up desire by producers and consumers to have more visibility into the provenance and lifecycle of our food and drinks,” he said.

Harmon stated that the project will highlight visibility and trust that only a robust public distributed ledger can bring to an industry that affects everyone.

Source: Hedera Hashgraph