Quadrans and Truebit revolutionizing Textile industry
The Project
The TRICK project, supported by the EU’s Horizon 2020 program, aims to promote sustainable practices in Europe’s textile, clothing, and food industries through a digital platform.
- The platform leverages blockchain technology for data security and facilitates the transition to circular business models.
- The project also focuses on establishing legal and technical frameworks to ensure compliance with laws like GDPR and standardize sustainability practices.
- There is a significant emphasis on involving policymakers and providing recommendations to support circular economy policies.
- TRICK seeks to engage a variety of stakeholders, including SMEs and consumers, to enhance the adoption and impact of sustainable practices.
Within the architecture of the TRICK platform, the Quadrans Foundation with the continued support of Truebit Team has developed a unique tool to enable verified textile traceability information to be provided to the end consumer.
Why Quadrans?
Quadrans, with its global accessibility, emerged to serve the intricate needs of industries and supply chains. It offers automated processes through traceability and smart contracts, thereby lowering costs and bolstering security and enables seamless collaboration and cross-border transactions.
Quadrans is an open-source Blockchain ecosystem derived from Ethereum, retaining elements like the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The platform has evolved to integrate unique features while maintaining interoperability with Ethereum, supporting seamless transitions of existing solutions. Looking ahead, Quadrans plans to implement a hybrid consensus protocol combining Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) to enhance security and efficiency.
Ultimately Quadrans plans with the next updates to integrate post-quantum digital signatures and in parallel to create a quantum cryptography layer placing itself already in an advanced security position even after the advent of quantum computers.
For those reasons Quadrans was chosen by the TRICK consortium as the reference public blockchain and data plane where information regarding production processes to consumers and stakeholders can be saved.
How Quadrans?
The Identity-Manager Smart Contract provides a decentralized mechanism on the blockchain for managing and verifying the associations between user identifiers and their corresponding public addresses. It supports functions like adding or editing identities and retrieving associated public addresses or user IDs. It ensures controlled access by allowing only a designated IdentityManager address to modify identities, enhancing decentralization by eliminating reliance on a centralized database for storing these associations.
The Portability Smart-Contract on the public layer stores all public documents for each instance of the portability process. The smart contract is designed to allow write access solely to its owner, enhancing security by ensuring that only the owner can add data, and upon completion, ownership can be relinquished to a null address to seal the data permanently. This design prevents unauthorized data alteration even if the private key is compromised. In brief, the smart contract can handle the following data:
- PEF Report: Product Environmental Footprint
- HP Textile Composition Report: Health Protection Textile Composition
- HP Report: Health Protection Report
- SEA Certifications: Social and Ethical Assessment Certifications
- AC Report: Ant-Counterfeiting Report
Why Truebit?
Data portability empowers users by allowing them to transfer their data across various services or platforms, thereby avoiding vendor lock-in and enhancing competition among providers. This flexibility is especially important in the blockchain ecosystem, where it supports the interoperability of decentralized applications and aids in operational efficiency and disaster recovery. A number of alternative solutions were examined before implementing portability on blockchain via Truebit:
- A Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) secures sensitive operations within a processor by isolating the execution space from external software threats, even from the main operating system. Challenges include performance overheads, limited memory, and the complexity of secure coding practices. Vulnerabilities require ongoing updates, and integration with decentralized systems like blockchain is complicated due to contrasting security models. Additionally, adopting TEEs can increase costs and limit cloud provider options due to the need for specialized hardware.
- The Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) provides a unified interface for web3 developers, facilitating token transfers and arbitrary messaging with enhanced security features like a Risk Management Network and decentralized oracle computation. It enables diverse functions such as data messaging across blockchains, direct token transfers, and programmable instructions for cross-chain interactions. However, CCIP faces limitations including restricted blockchain pair support and difficulties in integrating private with public networks.
Truebit Verify is designed to ensure immutable trust by verifying code execution, outcomes, and authorship, as well as offering transparency and provenance for data and algorithms used in AI and automated processes.
- The system allows developers to create and deploy self-contained functions called Truebit Tasks, which are executed on decentralized nodes via a REST API managed by the Truebit Verify Hub.
- The platform utilizes blockchain technology to secure operations, ensure transparency in task execution, and manage financial aspects, involving various stakeholders like Task Creators, Task Users, and Node Providers who contribute computing resources and ensure result integrity.
- An attestation of every task execution is provided as proof of execution. Inputs, outputs, code, and events are cryptographically signed and written to a Truebit Certified Transcript, which is hashed and rolled-up to a public blockchain.
The Verifier Agent
The Quadrans Team has developed a key component called the Verifier Agent that allows the authenticity and integrity of data to be verified before it is published on Portability Smart-Contract.
- It then allows a final verification to be done on the data before sealing and freezing the data within the smart contract to ensure its immutability.
- Thanks to Truebit’s architecture and its underlying decentralized verification network, the implementation of this component within the whole architecture adds an additional and independent verification layer.
Digital Twin and NFT
In the TRICK Project, the NFTs represent individual products, enhancing their authenticity, traceability, and security by embedding a uniqueProductID that links back to centralized systems. Additionally, each NFT has a meta-data file stored on IPFS, detailing the product’s attributes and ensuring transparency.
Each NFT is connected to the portability Smart Contract and it is cryptographically linked to the data on Hyperledger (private) thanks to the proof generated by the execution of Truebit task: the Transcript.
Next Steps
The activity of testing and adapting the product to real business needs is ongoing. Pilot projects are currently being conducted by major textile companies such as Fratelli Piacenza S.p.A and the Customs and Monopolies Agency, among others. The expectation is to release the first apparel samples associated with Quadrans NFT by the end of 2024.
Stay tuned
