Blockchain-Based Traceability and Peer-to-Peer Trading for Urban Fish Farming

• Omolola A. OGBOLUMANI

  Author

• Benita AGBAGWARA

  Author

Aquaculture now supplies many of the fish consumed worldwide, yet the origin of the fish usually cannot be verified. Species substitution remains widespread despite decades of labelling regulation, with recent market surveys reporting mislabeling in roughly one of every three samples. In small-scale production systems, the traceability record consists of paper ledgers and trust-based relationships that can be reconstructed after the fact, and existing digital platforms address this by centralising records, which relocates the trust problem rather than removing it. This paper presents a traceability architecture in which provenance records are made tamper-evident by cryptographic commitment rather than by institutional trust. Environmental telemetry captured continuously at the pond is aggregated into a per-shipment evidentiary document, stored off-chain on content-addressed distributed storage, and committed on-chain as a Keccak-256 digest, so that any later alteration of the record invalidates its published commitment. Successive custody stages embed the content identifier of the preceding stage, producing a hash-linked chain in which tamper-evidence propagates forward rather than remaining confined to a single record. The settlement is in fiat money and done at the time of the transaction using the decentralized price oracle, which ensures that the agreed value of the shipment is not affected by the fluctuations in exchange rate. This paper discusses the design of the mechanism, its threat model, the guarantees it provides, and the trust it requires.

• 72_Ogbolumani and Agbagwara (2026)

Copyright (c) 2026 Omolola A. OGBOLUMANI, Benita AGBAGWARA (Author)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.