Trusted collaboration mechanism of blockchain and smart contracts in the circular economy supply chain

Abstract

This paper aims to solve the problems of information islands, complex authority management and difficult data traceability in the circular economy supply chain. Utilizing blockchain and its built-in smart contract technology, this study investigates a trustworthy collaborative mechanism designed to enhance the security of circular economy supply chains. This paper first adopts a multi-chain layered architecture and designs the production, recycling and remanufacturing chains into three parallel sub-chains. Each sub-chain optimizes data for its specific business to eliminate information islands. This paper designs an automatic execution protocol based on smart contracts, sets different access rules according to data types and sensitivity, ensures data security access through policy management and permission determination contracts, and reduces human intervention. This paper leverages the blockchain-native hash-chain structure and Merkle tree verification mechanism to achieve end-to-end tamper-proof traceability and enhance supply chain transparency. The PoVT (Proof of Vote and Trust) consensus mechanism can adjust node weights and optimize network resource allocation dynamically. The results show that the average information response time of the multi-chain layered architecture in the production and remanufacturing chains is 2.52 s and 5 s. In terms of data traceability, the method achieves an average traceability accuracy rate of 97.498%; the average TPS (transaction per second) of PoVT is 63.286, and the decentralization score is 0.82. Thirty repeated experiments demonstrated that the average permission verification time was 2.35 s, with a mean false positive rate of 1.05% and a defense success rate of 99.12%, showing statistically significant differences compared to three baseline methods ( p < 0.01). In summary, successfully combining blockchain with smart contracts can create an effective method for providing trusted collaboration mechanisms to facilitate the establishment of circular economy supply chains and show great promise as a solution to address information silos and issues with traceability of data.