Blockchain and smart contracts in the Fashion industry

During these years the Blockchain technology is living a growing era. It is based on a peer to peer network that allows the transfer of the assets among users involved in the network, without the needs of a third party. The network's transactions are handled by a consensus algorithm that performs the validation process and updates the ledger by adding the transactions block to the chain. The concept behind the blockchain is that all the transaction data are completely public, nevertheless, the identity of the user involved is kept secret. By the last years, many companies are getting interested in the blockchain applications. Anyway, in most cases, the data shared are sensitive information and companies don't want to keep them public. Therefore during the last years was born the first permissioned blockchain solutions, maintained by a consortium system of nodes. The blockchain world nowadays is splitted between permissioned and permissionless blockchains. The permissionless is a fully decentralized network where anyone in the world has read and write access over it and can participate in the consensus process. The permissioned solution is a blockchain where the consensus process is controlled by a pre-selected set of nodes. One of the main challenges is how to create great interoperability among private and public blockchains to exploit in the best way the main advantages of each blockchain design and features. For example, one might imagine a company that handles all the internal production process using private blockchain and once the items are produced, they are sold to the end-user exploiting a token based on a public blockchain. Starting from the above considerations, this thesis work aims to create a blockchain solution for the management of the supply chain process of a Fashion Company. In particular, the thesis addresses the issue of transparent fashion upcycling, which is generally characterized by processes involving many different actors. The goal of the blockchain-based solution devised is to track the items over the flow more clearly and transparently. The solution implements a cross-chain interaction between Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum network. Fabric manages all the aspects related to the supply chain (orders, production, part of sale process). Ethereum instead is only used to the end-user sell process of the items. The outcome of the thesis consists of a Decentralized Application able to switch the flow to both the blockchains. The application developed allows a transparent tracking analysis of all the clothes items transferred over the actors, allowing an easy way to track the items. The data shared over the Fabric network are readable and writable by actors with read rights. The project archive a cross-chain interoperability implemented at Application layer. The supply chain process is clear and the actors involved communicate in a good way keeping a well defined permissioned access to the data.