AgriChain: Design, Implementation and Empirical Evaluation of an Ethereum Smart-Contract Framework for Agricultural Supply-Chain Traceability

Abstract

Agricultural supply chains remain vulnerable to provenance fraud, cold-chain opacity and inefficient recall investigation because batch records are typically fragmented across paper documents and siloed enterprise databases that are neither tamper-evident nor independently verifiable. This paper presents AgriChain, an Ethereum smart-contract framework that records batch initialisation, supply-chain events, ownership transfers, batch splitting, batch merging and IoT-style oracle sensor readings on a public blockchain, paired with an off-chain SQLite indexer and a Flask dashboard for fast querying. The system was deployed on the Ethereum Sepolia test network and its behaviour is evaluated using a fully block-traceable primary experiment (14 transactions spanning the complete lifecycle of a rice batch and a two-batch corn merge) together with the cumulative on-chain history recorded by the deployment (9 batches, 16 events, 3 merges and 8 oracle submissions (all 8 verified). Independent recompilation of the contract confirms a deployed bytecode size of 19,163 bytes, comfortably within Ethereum's 24,576-byte EIP-170 limit. Measured gas consumption is reported per function (from 38,436 gas for an ownership transfer to 691,659 gas for a mass-balance-checked split). Critically, cross-referencing the on-chain evidence against the local database uncovered a genuine synchronisation defect: confirmed on-chain split operations are silently absent from the off-chain indexer and all exports derived from it, a fault we root-caused to a nested-SQLite-connection locking conflict and confirmed by direct reproduction. We report this defect, its mechanism and its practical implications for any blockchain traceability system that pairs an authoritative ledger with a local query index. The paper concludes with an honest account of the system's current limitations including an open (non-allow-listed) oracle-submission function and an unused batch-recall state and outlines concrete future work.