# A Non-Fungible Token and Blockchain-Based Cotton Lint Traceability Solution
## 1 Introduction  
Cotton is one of the essential foundation crops for the global agricultural and textile industries [1]. In the textile industry, lint is the product of cotton fibres that are not further processed and whose quality has a decisive influence on textiles' final quality and commercial value. Indicators for the measurement of the quality of cotton lint include the grade, colour grade, fibre length, macron level, moisture return and impurity content, which together reflect the commercial value of cotton lint and the range of market applications [2, 3]. Despite the importance of cotton lint in the textile industry, its supply chain's complexity allows unscrupulous merchants to tamper with information, posing a severe threat to the quality and safety of cotton lint. Therefore, ensuring the truthfulness and reliability of information on every aspect of cotton lint, from cultivation to consumption, is crucial. Integrating the entire distribution phase into a supply chain makes it possible to ensure the cotton lint's quality and provide consumers with product traceability information [4, 5]. This traceability helps to build public trust in the cotton lint's safety and quality control [6]. However, establishing a reliable, efficient and stable traceability system to ensure the quality of cotton lint is still a great challenge [7]. Quality certification and the recognition of the value of cotton lint have traditionally relied on paper-based official inspection certificates. This approach introduces the problem of a reliance on the authority of a trusted third party. Although such certificates record critical parameters of cotton lint's quality, such as the colour grading, fibre length, impurity content and other specific indicators, their information capacity is limited and they cannot fully reflect the state of cotton lint from the source of production to the final product [8]. Under the current, traditional model, consumers or buyers must unconditionally rely on a centralised system of organisations that issue inspection reports on cotton lint. However, this model of unconditional trust in platform data threatens organisations' trust and data privacy [9]. This centralised system makes achieving transparency and traceability throughout the cotton lint supply chain difficult, resulting in missing or opaque information in the product flow chain [10]. Consumers in pursuit of quality cotton lint do not only seek high-quality lint but also a guarantee of the authenticity of its quality control and traceability records throughout its life cycle. Therefore, the trust mechanism constitutes a crucial cornerstone in the cotton lint trading ecosystem, directly affecting market participants' decision-making confidence and the transaction efficiency [11]. To address the shortcomings of traditional traceability methods, blockchain has been introduced into the cotton lint supply chain to improve its transparency, traceability and quality control. Before delving into the benefits of blockchain technology for cotton lint supply chain management, it is necessary to provide the reader with a concise overview of the technology. Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger architecture that enables the decentralised recording and verification of the transactions occurring in a peer-to-peer network through consensus algorithms [12]. Its core feature is that the data stored on the blockchain are open and transparent, and cryptographic principles and encryption algorithms ensure the integrity and non-comparability of the data used. A blockchain can be analogised to a chain of data that can only grow unidirectionally, where each block contains a record of transactions within a specific window of time and is linked to the others in a chain in a strict hash-pointer order [13]. An NFT mechanism can be introduced to create digital assets and certifications corresponding to physical cotton lint to address the trust relationship between entities in the supply chain.