SeaTrack

SeaTrack is an innovative blockchain-based database project aimed at combating prevalent fish fraud practices in the seafood and aquaculture industry. By meticulously tracking each fish throughout its journey, from capture on the high seas to its final sale, SeaTrack revolutionizes traceability and fosters transparency for customers, researchers, and governments.

The database, stored on the blockchain using Filecoin, encompasses a wide range of crucial information, including fish attributes (such as catch location, weight, species, fishery, certifications, processing date), details about fisheries (such as name, location, registrations, fishing methods), brokers (including name, location, certifications), and other relevant parties. By implementing strict permissions and limitations on database modifications for each participant, SeaTrack ensures that no individual can manipulate the system to integrate fraudulent products. Moreover, the on-chain nature of transactions simplifies the identification and tracking of non-compliant parties when fraudulent activities occur.

In addition to its practical goals, SeaTrack also serves as a showcase for the versatility and potential of blockchain technology beyond its conventional applications. By providing tangible benefits to various stakeholders, SeaTrack aims to elevate the significance and utility of blockchain technology across industries.

SeaTrack was designed based on two fundamental dependencies - FileCoin to store the vast amounts of data generated by the seafood industry, and WorldCoin to track and identify individuals, helping in the response to fraudulent activities.

The Seafood industry produces an estimated 2 trillion individual fish per year. While this is a very rough estimate, it is the order of magnitude correct and shows just how much of a challenge storing data about each fish would be. On average, 63419 fish are caught every second. This is, obviously, a rather challenging storage problem, one that I don't believe blockchain infrastructure is capable of handling. However, ignoring the high TPS for a moment, the total amount of data that needs storing is not unreasonable. I estimate that each fish will require ~256 bytes of associated data, namely made up of pointers to items in the catch location, fishery, or broker. This would result in roughly 512 TB of data produced every year, costing roughly $1,196, according to file.app's online calculator. Since the amount of data currently stored on the filecoin network is measured in exabytes (https://storage.filecoin.io/), we can be reasonably sure a few hundred terabytes can be handled. Thus, the decision was made to store the database itself on Filecoin, relying on the immutable nature to preserve all transactions, and verifications for each uploaded file (the CIDs) on Polygon, due to the lower gas fees and higher TPS compared with Ethereum.

In order to keep track of each individual, their WorldCoin ID is used, alongside SeaTrack-specific metadata stored on-chain, is used to track their permissions, and contributions, and to consistently track them if fraudulent activities are detected. It's unfortunate that WorldCoin only operates on people, as nearly every operation in the supply chain is facilitated by corporations instead of people. The solution is to assign a company representative whose ID is used for all operations and to allow other users to contribute data on behalf of this representative.

Overall, this problem is far from being solved. Since the bulk of the data is stored on Filecoin without trustless verifications applied prior to uploading, readers will be relied on to identify invalid additions instead of the database itself. Furthermore, since FileCoin stores data in small 1GiB (gibibyte) chunks, keeping track of the thousands of different files within the database is a non-trivial issue, especially when it comes to re-combining them back into a singular database for each entity. Finally, tying corporations to the individual Worldcoin IDs leaves open the possibility of changing owners to hide responsibility for fraud, a less-than-ideal scenario. However, none of these problems are core to this solution, and we are confident that all can be overcome.