VTraceChain: A verifiable block chain with double-chain architecture for enhanced tracking

Traceability is critical for ensuring supply chain transparency, safeguarding food safety, enhancing consumer trust, and improving operational efficiency. However, conventional traceability systems rely on centralized storage and capture only partial product data, making them vulnerable to tampering. While blockchain provides immutability and transparency, it raises privacy concerns when enterprise-sensitive data is placed on-chain, and existing consensus protocols often suffer from poor scalability and high latency. To address these challenges, we propose VTraceChain, a verifiable traceability framework based on a double-chain architecture. Public lifecycle data are recorded on a Traceability Chain, while enterprise-sensitive information is encrypted and stored on a Data Chain, with IPFS integration to minimize on-chain storage overhead. A Verifiable Cross-Chain Integrity Mechanism (VCIM) ensures consistency between the two chains, and a novel consensus protocol–Proof of Point Competitiveness (PoPc)–links node behavior to reputation scores to improve consensus efficiency and reliability. An incentive mechanism further promotes honest participation and deters malicious activity. We implement a prototype of VTraceChain on Hyperledger Fabric using ginseng traceability as a case study. Security analyses demonstrate that the system effectively resists Eclipse, replay, Sybil, and spoofing attacks. Performance evaluations show that the prototype achieves high throughput (up to 152 TPS), low latency (0.11 s), and stable resource consumption under varying workloads. Scalability experiments with 200–1000 nodes and 100/300/500 transactions per second confirm that throughput and latency remain stable, with smooth trends and no instability. These results indicate that VTraceChain is a practical and efficient solution for secure, scalable, and privacy-preserving blockchain-based traceability. By explicitly addressing both security and performance requirements, the framework provides a reproducible foundation for future real-world deployments in multi-party supply chain environments.