Secure and Traceable Decentralized Agri-Food Supply Chain Framework Using Ethereum Blockchain and IPFS Platform

The multilayered structure of agri-food supply chain and involvement of several stakeholders complicates the management of critical factors such as product origin, production phases, pricing, and quality standards. These challenges often lead to inefficiencies, miscommunication, and vulnerabilities to fraud, undermining consumer trust and food safety. Blockchain technology offers a groundbreaking approach by providing secure, transparent, and efficient tracking mechanism across agri-food supply chain stakeholders. It supports real-time monitoring of food products, improves safety measures, upholds the quality standards, and builds trust among stakeholders. This study proposes a secure and transparent framework for the agri-food supply chain by applying the features of a private Ethereum 2.0 blockchain and smart contracts. The proposed framework provides traceability, minimizes fraudulent activities and improves overall supply chain integrity which ultimately benefiting both consumers and stakeholders. The proposed solution eliminates the dependency on intermediaries by providing stakeholders with complete visibility into transaction details, thereby enhancing food safety, quality, and reliability through a decentralized application. A key innovation of this framework is the consolidation of all functionalities into a comprehensive Ethereum smart contract, which significantly reduces contract complexity, gas consumption, and transaction fees, making the system more cost-effective and scalable for users. Furthermore, the integration of the Interplanetary File Storage System ensures efficient and reliable storage of information off-chain, reducing the burden on the blockchain platform while maintaining data integrity. The study individually evaluated the latency and throughput of various smart contract functions. The observed latency comes into the range from 8.3 s to 10.4 s, and the throughput, varying between 0.37 to 0.60 transactions per second which falls within the acceptable range of Ethereum testnet environment. Security analysis confirms the robustness and resilience of the framework, ensuring its suitability for real-world deployment.