A Survey on Blockchain-based Supply Chain Finance with Progress and Future directions

TL;DR

This paper addresses the financing gaps in global SCF by examining how Blockchain can enhance data integrity, transparency, and automation. It presents a three-part framing—Supply Chain Finance fundamentals, Blockchain technology, and their combination—to map current research, assess progress, and identify gaps. The authors synthesize about 248 papers from two major databases, categorize them into six hot topics, and outline forward-looking directions such as dataset construction, privacy protection, comprehensive platforms, intelligent risk management, and cross-chain computing. The work provides a computer-science–driven perspective on integrating Blockchain into SCF, highlighting practical implications for risk control, platform design, and new financing models while calling for standardized datasets and deeper cross-disciplinary research.

Abstract

Supply Chain Finance is very important for supply chain competition, which is an important tool to activate the capital flow in the supply chain. Supply Chain Finance-related research can support multiple applications and services, such as providing accounts receivable financing, enhancing risk management, and optimizing supply chain management. For more than a decade, the development of Blockchain has attracted widely attention in various fields, especially in finance. With the characteristics of data tamper-proof, forgery-proof, cryptography, consensus verification, and decentralization, Blockchain fits well with the realistic needs of Supply Chain Finance, which requires data integrity, authenticity, privacy, and information sharing. Therefore, it is time to summarize the applications of Blockchain technology in the field of Supply Chain Finance. What Blockchain technology brings to Supply Chain Finance is not only to alleviate the problems of information asymmetry, credit disassembly, and financing cost, but also to improve Supply Chain Finance operations through smart contracts to intelligent Supply Chain Finance and in combination with other technologies, such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and data mining, jointly. So there has been some work in Blockchain-based Supply Chain Finance research for different Supply Chain Finance oriented applications, but most of these work are at the management level to propose conceptual frameworks or simply use Blockchain without exploiting its deep applications. Moreover, there are few systematic reviews providing a comprehensive summary of current work in the area of Blockchain-based Supply Chain Finance. In this paper, we ...

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Blockchain structure. Each block points the immediately previous block via previous block hash in the current block header, except the first block which is called genesis block in the Blockchain
• Figure 2: Smart contract model. Smart contract is event-driven, stateful and thresholded, shared computer programs deployed on the Blockchain that enable data processing and automatic execution of triggered actions set by contract rules[53]. First a node completes the deployment of the smart contract and broadcasts it to the consensus nodes for deployment and verification, the result of the successful verification is written to the block as a record. Then, the smart contract can perform its function
• Figure 3: The probabilistic blockchain architecture and traditional blockchain architecture
• Figure 4: Intelligent Risk Management Conceptual Framework. In this framework, Blockchain computation and feature extraction can be done using computer techniques such as machine learning of artificial intelligence, data mining.