Haidrun’s CEO, Jonas Lundqvist, is featured in The Guardian explaining how blockchain supports traceability in the food supply chain: “In a food supply chain, for example, the record of a journey from farm to fork is available to monitor in real time, while the disclosure of data provides accountability for trading transactions and farming practices to support claims such as organic, freshness and superior quality.

Managing major design and construction projects involves dealing with complex supply chains and coordinating multiple stakeholders from architects and engineers to building firms, materials suppliers and accountants. It can be a major headache, compounded by an abundance of building codes, safety regulations and standards. The process is prone to inefficiencies, errors and mistrust, while there is an increasing drive to be more sustainable.

Economic and societal inequality, concerns about human rights and protecting our environment, combined with the need for effective governance frameworks to address these issues, have created a near-perfect environment for blockchain technology to be part of the solution.

In March 2022, the Blockchain in Telecom: Global Markets report published by Research and Markets, valued the global market for blockchain in telecom at $143.6 Million in 2021 and projected it to grow to $1.03 billion by 2026. That’s a massive compound annual growth rate of 48.5%. But other reports are even more upbeat.

With an ever-increasing counterfeit medicine market and growing financial fraud, as well as cases of medication simply being labelled incorrectly or untraceable, the pharmaceutical supply chain has become an issue for everyone from the boardroom to the home. According to Deloitte, in the US alone, more than $200bn is lost each year because of counterfeit drugs infiltrating insecure supply chains.

Organisations increasingly seek to add more trust and transparency into their sustainability policies for all stakeholders – from employees and shareholders to regulators, the media and consumers. Blockchain is emerging as a key technology that can help companies focus on reducing carbon footprints, ESG disclosures, and sustainability tracking by giving improved visibility into all tiers of the supply chain.

Ask most people about blockchain and they will talk about its inextricable relationship with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are changing the face of traditional finance. But they may well also refer to the implications for energy consumption and the environment as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin use astonishing amounts of electricity.

Blockchain technology has come a long way since it was unleashed upon the world more than 10 years ago. Initially proposed as the backbone of a new type of electronic cash system called cryptocurrency and most associated with the rise of Bitcoin, blockchain has evolved into something far more. Today, it is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the future digital economy, with the potential to disrupt a multitude of business sectors including the automotive industry.

We take it for granted that food will be on the shelves when we visit the supermarket, but the recent images of empty shops and warnings of shortages have shown us how fragile the supply chain can be. This has focused minds on the security and reliability of our food supply along with other issues such as food fraud, defects and safety recall, inefficiency and food provenance and traceability.

Without trust there is nothing. So, while the IoT is changing many parts of the digital transformation landscape, real trust is often the missing component for businesses to fully embrace the technology. How can we be sure that the temperature gauge was working and calibrated? Was it really in the location it said it was and was the limit the actual limit?