Bio-Digital Supply Chain Integrity: A Next-Generation Framework for Commodity Tracking and Authentication (BDSCI)

Global commodity supply chains continue to face persistent vulnerabilities related to fraud, substitution, provenance manipulation, and weak verification of chain-of-custody claims. Existing traceability systems—ranging from paper-based documentation to digital ledgers and blockchain architectures—have improved the persistence and accessibility of records but have not fundamentally resolved a core structural weakness: they authenticate representations of commodities more effectively than the commodities themselves. As a result, false or manipulated identities introduced at early stages of the supply chain may be preserved with high fidelity throughout downstream processes. This paper advances a conceptual and operational framework termed Bio-Digital Supply Chain Integrity (BDSCI), which reframes supply-chain trust as a physical-to-digital identity problem rather than a documentation problem. The framework integrates three interdependent layers: (1) intrinsic or near-intrinsic commodity authentication using portable nanopore sequencing and related scientific identification methods, (2) edge-based artificial intelligence for localized, real-time analysis and decision support, and (3) permissioned blockchain systems for tamper-resistant, auditable, and cross-organizational record preservation.