Blockchain & CSR

Trust is, and has always been, the foundation upon which we make our decisions when transacting with one another. It is how we decide whether the parties that we are interacting with are dependable and likely to fulfil their side of any deal. The social world, by nature, doesn’t trust businesses that make profit. It believes that CSR is just another marketing technique.

The nature of trust, or more precisely how trust is determined, has not always been what it is today. As how-we-determine-value evolves, so does the range of people with whom we transact. In the past, we transacted with people in our immediate vicinity, like a town or city. The Internet has grown the marketplace to include everyone in the world who has internet access.

It is in this way that blockchain gives businesses a platform to act with genuine integrity towards their community and customers.

However, blockchain has the potential to add transparency to more than just the financial aspect of business. For example, one of blockchain’s foremost user cases are within supply chain management. The technology can allow for the immutable tracking of anything across the supply chain. This means that consumers can know exactly what their food contains, whether it is organic and fair trade, whether their goods are genuine or produced with respect to workers’ rights.

This is not only beneficial to the consumer, in that they can be absolutely sure about where products came from and what they contain, but also to the company producing the products. Such transparency helps to maintain the integrity of a company by reducing scandals in production, such as a reliance on sweatshops to produce cheap clothing.