Funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.3, Theme 10.
Funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.3, Theme 10.
Governance of quality blokchains
Coordinator
Analysis of sustainable governance and organisational models: a) building the most suitable governance models, b) interorganisational relationships and formal / informal networks for managing and promoting sustainable practices and relationships along the value chains, rural and urban areas, and food environments to enable equitable access to food
Report on selected governance models for both long distance and local value chains on the base of selected case studies (M9)
Report on network governance strategies aimed at facilitating access to food (M18)
Blockchain is a new technology, based on hashing, which is at the foundation of the platforms for trading cryptocurrencies and executing smart contracts. The particularity of the blockchain technology is that it is based on some cryptographic elements; in detail there are two main concepts of cryptography: hash functions and asymmetric cryptography. Cryptographic hash functions are used as a data integrity verification tool, instead asymmetric cryptography is an encryption technique that uses two different keys for encoding and decoding the message, thus overcoming the various single key methods, one public and one private. The first is disclosed to the public domain, while the second is kept in secret for the success of the algorithm. Therefore, the basic concept is that only the public key can decrypt an encrypted message with the private one and vice versa.
In recent years blockchain technology has established itself in the agri-food sector, especially in food sector where it is recognized as one of the main technological innovations of agriculture 4.0 on the traceability of the production, mainly against fraud defending the genuineness of Italian agricultural products, ensuring the use of appropriate agronomics techniques. In fact, the combination of this technological tool with the tracing of agri-food products represents a Pareto optimal front for the trade and certification of products made in Italy. In particular, to defend against the sophistication of wine a very widespread practice that is mainly realized through the addition of methanol, also known as methyl alcohol or wood spirit; other less dangerous sophistications are: use of table grapes unsuitable for vinification for the production of wine then passed off as PGI or PDO. As regards counterfeiting, it consists in selling industrial products with names or brands that deceive the consumer. It will be applied to Sicilian citrus, wine and oil sectors.
The main strengths of this technology are the safety intended as resistance to system attacks, and the guarantee offered on the goodness of the data. The main technical features of blockchain technology are: decentralization of consent and registry, automation, transparency, cryptography and the immutability of the data; the latter because each block that is added to the chain contains a reference to the previous one, and therefore changing a block would mean having to modify also all those successive ones, consequently it is not convenient. Specifically we noticed how blockchain technology, being a versatile tool, enjoys a considerable interest from many companies of the consortiums Etna DOC for wine chain and Monti Iblei for oil chain and Sicilian blood oranges, in order to promote and ensure the certainty of the brand associated with them and in particular the made in Sicily in the world.
