Challenge
An international logistics company coordinated deliveries across multiple subcontractors and national borders. The core problem: at handover points between partners, there was no reliable, tamper-proof documentation. Bills of lading were sometimes altered retroactively, responsibilities for damages could not be assigned with certainty, and audits required weeks of manual review.
Solution
We implemented a hybrid architecture that strictly separates operational tracking data from blockchain-based proof of evidence. The operational backbone is a GS1 EPCIS-compliant event system: status updates, sensor readings, and route data flow into a conventional database and are visualized in real time via a React dashboard.
The blockchain — Polygon as a Layer 2 solution — serves exclusively as a proof layer. Only cryptographic hashes of documents, digital signatures at goods handovers, handoff confirmations between partners, and automatically detected SLA violations are written on-chain. Sensitive business data such as pricing, exact routes, and contract details remain strictly off-chain.
Freight and accompanying documents are stored in a decentralized manner via IPFS. The content hashes are anchored on-chain — making it possible to prove at any time that a document existed in exactly this form at the claimed point in time, without revealing its contents.
A central design point: the system makes transparent who recorded a data point when — not whether the physical reality matches (the so-called oracle problem). That is why we rely on verified IoT sensors (temperature, weight, geolocation) and defined input sources at critical handover points to keep the gap between the physical world and digital proof as narrow as possible.