They All Bet on Blockchain. The Ones Still Standing Bet on the Boring Stuff.

In 2021, five researchers made a quiet, unfashionable claim: blockchain almost never delivers a supply-chain outcome on its own. Studying four live projects - coffee, recycled plastic, bunker fuel, aviation parts - through agency theory, they argued the ledger was table stakes. What actually moved the needle were the mechanisms around it: usable apps, real payment rails, local relationships, customer education. Five years later, the market has voted, and it voted their way - mostly by breaking the things that ignored them.

The flagships died on adoption, not code

The clearest verdict came from failure. TradeLens, the Maersk-IBM shipping platform, shut down in 2022. Not because the technology flopped - it cut paperwork costs 70-90% and shipping times 40% - but because it never signed up enough of the industry to matter. Maersk's own explanation was blunt: full global collaboration was never achieved. Walmart's Food Trust told the same story, quietly expanding from leafy greens to little more than green bell peppers.

Notice where TradeLens sat: shipping. The exact domain as the paper's BunkerTrace case. The bunker-fuel study had already flagged the catch - the system doesn't reduce goal conflict until a critical mass adopts it. TradeLens is that footnote scaled to an industry.

The academic literature has since hardened this into a finding. Recent operations-management work reports that blockchain's success in generating real business value remains very limited, with an exceedingly high failure rate. When researchers dug into why, they landed on governance, stakeholder engagement, and confidentiality - the behavioural and agency factors the 2021 paper put at the centre. The tech was rarely the problem.

What's changed: regulation now does the pushing

The 2021 paper treated adoption as a choice - firms opting in for ethics or differentiation. In 2026 it's increasingly a mandate. The EU's Digital Product Passport, rolling out from 2026-2027 starting with batteries and moving to textiles and electronics, plus deforestation rules, turns traceability from a nice-to-have into market access. That's a far stronger forcing function than anything in the original study.

But here's the twist the paper would have appreciated: blockchain is explicitly optional. Any secure system that delivers traceable, accessible data qualifies. The regulation cares about the trust and the record, not the chain. Which is almost exactly what iFinca's CEO said in 2021 - blockchain protects transparency, it doesn't provide it. It's a tool in the toolbox.

The uncomfortable update

The paper read social sustainability optimistically - Plastic Bank banking a widow in Haiti, iFinca lifting farmer pay 20% above cost. A more critical 2026 view complicates that. When a lead firm controls the data layer, the cost of participating can quietly push out the smallest suppliers - the very people these systems claim to lift. The architecture that empowers can also entrench. The paper's agency lens gestured at this; it didn't resolve it, and neither has the field.

Meanwhile the stack moved on. Nobody serious talks about blockchain alone anymore. It's blockchain plus AI plus IoT sensors, with verifiable credentials and cheaper layers doing the work the ledger can't.

So what

The 2021 thesis aged well, and on shipping it looks almost prescient. Where it dated: it framed blockchain as the interesting variable. In 2026, blockchain is one interchangeable option inside a data-and-compliance problem, with regulation and AI carrying the load.

Its still-underserved contribution is the human one - the social-sustainability angle and the service-provider-as-agent framing. Most current writing is about ROI, recalls, and compliance. Almost none of it asks the question the paper opened with: when the mechanisms do the work, how much of the blockchain premium was ever really the blockchain?

Sources: Chaudhuri, Bhatia, Kayikci, Fernandes & Fosso-Wamba, Annals of Operations Research (2021); Supply Chain Dive and Maersk statements on TradeLens (2022); Journal of Operations Management (2025) on blockchain-provider failure rates; Frontiers in Blockchain (2025) TradeLens governance analysis; Journal of Business Logistics (2026) on supply-chain power dynamics; EU Digital Product Passport / ESPR implementation reporting (2026).