RFID & Blockchain: A Technological Match Made in Rubikon Heaven
If you have any involvement with industrial supply chain management, or perhaps operate a retail store reliant on point of sale debit payments, you are no doubt aware of radio-frequency identification, otherwise known as RFID.
For an explanation of what RFID technology and how it works, click here.
The use of electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects is by no means new, with the RFID market totalling over $16 billion, the accompanying hardware market coming in at over $12 billion, and the supporting software market worth just over $4 billion in 2016.
That being said, there have been concern over the years about the costs and growing pains with the technology. Despite having being introduced to the retail supply chain in the early 1970s, RFID tags have only recently begun to reach their commercial potential.
Three primary factors have slowed implementation of RFID technology:
- RFID tag specificity can make them incompatible with other proprietary systems
- Until recently, the price point of RFID tags, readers, and printers made most applications of the technology prohibitively expensive
- Privacy and security concerns caused by the use of RFID to track people’s movements, purchases or possessions, have raised red flags and prevented RFID technology from being as broadly utilized as it might be
These are just three areas where the vulnerabilities of a RFID system are perfectly matched by the inherent strengths of the Rubikon blockchain. These benefits are also multiplied when applied to the complex tracking and information gathering standards of the Canadian Cannabis Industry. For more information on Canada’s opportunity to set the global standard for information and supply chain management, check out our article.
At the heart of blockchain’s decentralized peer-to-peer architecture lies an autonomous consensus protocol that relies on no central authority. This consensus mechanism facilitates agreement across a broad base community that immutability verifies the information stored on the blockchain. This means that data written to a blockchain, cannot be changed, altered, or corrupted.
In order to write or make alterations to the Rubikon ledger, an individual will have to be authorized to utilize the system and that individual will themselves have a private identifier associated with them. When they make a change to the data related to a specific product, they will stipulate the desired change and then scan the RFID tag to write the proposed change to the blockchain. In doing so, the system will determine precisely which product is in question, when the change was made, who made it, and the data entry point.
This methodology eliminates concerns regarding system incompatibility as the sensitive information is captured on the Rubikon blockchain rather than stored on a local database or the RFID tag itself. This makes the information accessible for use by other systems or even by QR code for consumer access. Uniquely, the Rubikon system will only require the encrypted product identifier string to specify a particular product, plant, or batch of seeds. This greatly reduces the amount of information required to be stored on the RFID tag and allows Rubikon tags to be smaller and more affordable, greatly reducing traditional barriers to entry by utilizing inductive HF RFID tags with the absolute minimum of storage capacity.
The immutable and transparent nature of the Rubikon blockchain eliminates privacy concerns through a sophisticated permissions system. While a consumer may want to know whether the product they are about to consume is safe to ingest, you would not want a competing producer to know everything about your yields, methods, and other derivative data. Rubikon keeps your data safe and secure while giving you access to your information and business intelligence than ever before.
All of these benefits are notwithstanding the extreme labour and data efficiency of using a single RFID system, Rubikon, to track products from production, through distribution, all the way to consumption and customer feedback.
This marriage of technology in the form of Rubikon is, as a result, very well placed to not only address the unique needs of the cannabis supply chain (as referred to in our summary of the incoming Canadian regulatory framework), but also to maximize its potential.
As an example, a licensed producer is not only able to ensure that every one of its employees or distribution partners has a verified ID for tracking activities from seed-to-sale, but each point of entry is now a wealth of rich data in which to achieve efficiencies or offer ever more engaging products.
From both a public interest perspective as well an economic evaluation, Marichain is the supply chain’s most effective tool in meeting objectives, analyzing performance, and making changes to continually improve.
The Rubikon Team
