Hadas Bar - Blog

The first and most important question when we think about blockchain is to ask, “is blockchain the right solution for this?” we don't want to use it just because it is the latest trend in the computer world.

• “Does a decentralized solution have any advantage for our project?” (collaborative network/democracy)
• “Are we ok with paying every time we have to write anything to the database?”
• “Who is going to pay the writing fee?”
• “Who are the main data providers of this project?”
• “What will be the motivation of data providers?”
• “Are you ok with all the data being open to the world?”
• “Who are your users?"
• “Can the data be changed after insertion?”
• “What kind of fake data prevention approach do you use?”

If we answer all of these questions, we are ready to use blockchain in our system. Which blockchain network do we want to use? Ethereum? Solana? A new one used only by us?

In the DFTB project, we chose Ethereum since it is relatively mature, easy to use, and has many nodes supporting it (about 8000). The Ethereum network allows us to use a mechanism called Smart Contract, which can store data that everyone can read. The smart contract has an ABI, similar to an API in traditional servers, describing its public methods.

We created two websites that use this ABI to show that connecting the blockchain from everywhere is possible.

The first one is English and has all functionality in the smart contract, and the second one is in Hebrew as a pilot for the next steps.

Those websites are static, meaning they are not using traditional backend servers.

Cuspis website

Cuspis group built the first one, which includes:

• Self-assessment tool for use by stakeholders to determine their current stage of digitalization. An output that will give directions on how to use digital food quality and digitalization tools.
• Communication hub for collecting data with automatic integration to the website and the blockchain.
• Website tool for stakeholders to directly input data about their production lifecycle or supply chain that will be automatically written and sent to the communication hub written to the blockchain, and published on the web.
• API interface for stakeholders that have their own IT system in place where they’ll send their production lifecycle or supply chain data through API to a communication hub which will be automatically published on the web and written in the blockchain.
• Website for consumers where they’ll be able to search by the lot number and find all relevant information about the production of this specific food they are buying, search by products and producers.

Here are some materials for this website:

• www.foodqualitrace.com
• Functional specification (pdf)
• Implementation specification (pdf)
• User manual (pdf)
• User manual - Hebrew (pdf)

Hebrew website

We in Hadas Bar were in charge of the Hebrew site. We built it using Angular 14.2 and the web3.js package connecting to it by the Metamask extension. This website has two main parts: first is a data tree containing all information stored in our smart contract, and the second is a developer's tool that can run each smart contract method.

foodqualitrace.hadasbar.com

Next step

As described in our previous data visualization post, this application's vision is to create different visualization for each stakeholder. We can achieve this by creating a standalone website or an application for each stakeholder or use. Or, we can create one application that suits everyone using a different configuration. Each method has pros and cons, but this is out of this post's scope.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement № 818182