Vanguard Magazine

12 DECEMBER 2018/JANUARY 2019 www.vanguardcanada.com blockchain the military supply chain It's the stuff of nIght- mares: a counterfeIt part makes Its way Into the mIlItary supply chaIn and Is Installed on a weapons system. thIs Is dIscovered only after In- stallatIon, upon faIlure of the weapons tests–or worse, In the fIeld after a full weapons faIlure. how can such a scenarIo be prevented? Blockchain BY JEFFREY D. RODNEY AND NOAH ZUCkERMAN can strengthen B lockchain technology may be part of the solution. By using blockchain to track and trace components within a supply chain, the provenance of this counterfeit part could be established early on and traced all the way back to its manu- facturer or supplier. The rise of computing and the Inter- net brought with it, for the first time in our history, a globally shared network of information. Today, the vast majority of military assets, infrastructure and opera- tions are deeply embedded into this global infrastructure. As we look forward, a new technological paradigm is upon us. With the rise of distributed ledger technologies like blockchain, there's a new, globally shared network of value and security on the horizon. Since the inception of Satoshi Nakamo- to's bitcoin protocol in 2008, the decen- tralized ledger space has grown into a bud- ding alternative global asset class with near infinite real-world applications. In order to support machine-to-machine data and val- ue transfer in a trustless environment with billions of connected devices, many decen- tralized ledger technologies are designing their protocols with a focus on scalability, sustainability and near-zero fees. Projects like IOTA, Waltonchain and VeChain are built to support intelligent infrastructure, secure data transfer, smart supply chain and intelligent Internet of Things (IoT). In parallel, experts estimate IoT–a net- work of physical objects or things embed- ded in electronics, software, sensors and network connectivity, enabling these ob- jects to collect and exchange data–will con- sist of almost 50 billion objects by 2020. At the cross-section of these two fledg- ling technologies are some extremely inter- esting opportunities. What is blockchain? While most people associate blockchain with bitcoin, blockchain refers to the tech- nology underlying the cryptocurrency, and it has many other applications. At its foundation, a blockchain is a mech- anism to provide trust between parties in a digital environment where trust doesn't exist. How does this work? In essence, a blockchain is just a database of facts that are shared across a network of computers How

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