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This industry-academia collaborative work studies the benefits and challenges associated with the use of distributed ledger (or blockchain) technology toward preventing counterfeiting in the presence of malicious supply-chain parties. ...We illustrate that the provision of a distributed and append-only ledger jointly governed by supply-chain parties themselves makes permissioned blockchains such as Hyperledger Fabric a promising approach toward mitigating counterfeiting. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that the privacy of supply-chain parties can be preserved as competing supply-chain parties strive to protect their businesses from the prying eyes of competitors and counterparties. ...Besides, we show that the recall process can be achieved efficiently with the help of the blockchain. The proposed solution, Fordchain, overcomes the challenges to achieve the best of both worlds: a solution to the counterfeiting problem using distributed ledger technology while providing accountability and the privacy notions of interest for supply-chain parties.

Though piloted with some centralized control related to the centralized issuance of qualifications, the paper describes how blockchain technology in this application could allow a consortium of companies to manage such a database in a decentralized structure like a decentralized autonomous organization.