Infraestrutura de Blockchain para Aplicações da Plataforma Pecuária de Baixo Carbono da Embrapa

Abstract

Livestock farming is one of Brazil's main economic activities. Given growing global concerns about climate change, Embrapa has launched concept brands that function as quality seals to encourage the adoption of more sustainable practices in the sector. This work aimed to develop and evaluate a blockchain infrastructure, as a proof of concept, for decentralized applications aimed at certifying products under the concept brands of Embrapa's Low Carbon Livestock Platform (PBC). The infrastructure was implemented with the Hyperledger Fabric framework on a set of virtual machines hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its performance was evaluated using Hyperledger Caliper, considering scenarios with different transaction volumes and sizes, as well as variations in the network ordering mechanism. The results indicated that the infrastructure stably supports a continuous write rate of 2250 KB/s. Conversely, average rates of 4500 KB/s exceed the network's capacity, resulting in a backlog of pending transactions. Transaction granularity did not significantly impact performance, while increasing the number of ordering nodes significantly reduced performance. We conclude that the proposed infrastructure is technically feasible to support certification applications linked to PBC brands, offering the potential to contribute to traceability and data reliability in the sustainable livestock production chain.