# Toward Blockchain-Enabled Supply Chain Anti-Counterfeiting and Traceability
## 1 Introduction  
The problem of counterfeit product trading, including luxurious goods or pharmaceutical products, has been one of the major challenges the supply chain industry has been facing in an innovation-driven global economy. The situation has been alarming with an exponential growth of counterfeit and pirated goods worldwide, for which it has also plagued companies with multinational supply chain networks. The analytical study [1] published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUPO) in 2019 regarding the global trading activities of counterfeit and pirated products has suggested the volume of international trade of counterfeit and pirated products increased from $250 billion in 2007, to up to $461 billion in 2013, representing approximately 2.5% of world imports. The imports of counterfeit and pirated products into EU amounted to nearly $116 billion, representing 5% of EU imports approximately. The results have been alarming according to the latest statistics published in 2016, suggested that the volume has already further amounted to as much as $509 billion representing 3.3% of world trade and 6.8% of imports from non-EU countries. The battle against counterfeit product trading remains a significant challenge; it is simultaneously of significant and growing concern to the globalized economy not to mention all the affected industries, such as the markets included in [2] and innumerable branded product companies. Trading activities in counterfeit goods not only infringeon trademarks and copyrights, and negatively impact on sales and profits of industries, but also generate profits for organized crime at the expense of the affected companies and governments. Counterfeit trading activities also pose broader adverse effects to the economy, public health, safety, and security of the wider community. Counterfeit product trading activities are operated swiftly in the globalized economy, misusing free trade zones according to the authors of [3], taking advantage of many legitimate trade facilitation mechanisms and thriving in economies with weak governance standard and limited innovative options to combat product counterfeits. In response to the growing concern in product counterfeit, innovative, fully functional, integrable, and affordable product anti-counterfeiting solutions with traceability functionalities have been widely and urgently demanded. These solutions are expected to utilize cutting-edge technologies so as to ensure the provenance and traceability of genuine products throughout the supply chain counterfeiting, and these suggested solutions should be widely adopted regardless of industries, size of the companies, and its supply chain systems. Given the growing concern in counterfeit trading activities, though there have already been a variety of innovative product anti-counterfeiting solutions introduced in supply chain industry, the main research question is as follows:  
\"Why would existing anti-counterfeiting and traceability systems benefit from decentralization enabled by blockchain technology to better combat the rampant counterfeiting attacks?\"  
The main question could further be addressed via answering the following sub-questions throughout the research:  
1. Why can blockchain be utilized to decentralize the supply chain anti-counterfeiting and traceability system? 2. What are the security limitations and concerns of existing supply chain anti-counterfeiting and traceability systems? 3. What are the advantages introduced by decentralized supply chain anti-counterfeiting and traceability systems? Given the main research question and the set of sub-questions derived from it, it is common to follow an organized way of exploring them stepwise in this research. An exploratory research method, as depicted in [4], will be adopted in this research in computing.