Originated from the Arabic word "Halal", which means lawful, legitimate, allowed or permissible, HalalChain (HLC) is a token that seeks to establish an ecosystem to regulate the Halal food industry certification system. This in turn, is meant to enable end-to-end tracing of the supply chain surrounding Halal food, medicine and cosmetics.
History and Challenges in the Global Halal Industry
Given that the concept of Halal is quite influential amongst muslim believers, a group of consumer products may be clearly defined. This in turn, has lead to segments of the Halal food sector to create high quality and organic products, which has also increased the demand for such products amongst non-muslim consumers.
For these reasons, HalalChain has come to establish the ecosystem to regulate such market and tackle current challenges faced within the industry:
- Lack of Globally Reorganized Halal Certification System: The absence of standardized halal certification system at the global level has given rise to technical barriers for cross-border trading of halal products among international economies.
- Innacurate and Unauthentic Data of Halal Products: Halal products that are not authentically certified or lacking transparent mechanism of certification can cause trust issues and delays in setting up a global distribution system. Moreover, the dearth of data of halal products simply adds up to the concerns. Sometimes, the data is available, however, it is found to be either inaccurate or unauthentic.
- Poor Regulation of Raw Materials for Halal Products: There is no heavily regulated market for raw materials of halal products. Such unavailability enables non-sharia-compliant ingredients and materials to be mixed with the halal food. In this situation, it is difficult to avoid this contamination due to the complexity and inter-connectivity of the world food supply chain. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for any halal certification agency to perform its duty of ensuring shariacompliance of food.
In these circumstances, such weakness damages Muslim consumers’ confidence in many ways. Due to the current industry landscape, the establishment of a uniformed regulatory framework is not possible within a short time span.
- Centralized Regulation for Halal Food: A centralized regulatory system for halal food is sufficiently difficult to manage and regulate the industry across the whole chain due to challenges and issues in its implementation. The methods, technology and regulatory bodies across the globe that run halal food supply chains have not kept pace with growing concerns of the modern Muslim world.
Technical Characteristics of the Coin
HalalChain adopts Qtum as the foundational blockchain technology as well as incorporating Hyperledger Fabric technology, which could materialize cross-chain data exchange between public blockchains and consortium blockchains as proposed by the Ink Chain team.
The Halal-Chain adopts a digital certification mechanism for identity authentication and access control. Through certified authority, a trusted third party – trusted by both the subject (owner) of the certificate and the party relying upon the certificate – ascertains that the public key of the subject and other identification information are bound together to verify a user’s identity.
HalalChain also categorizes nodes as either central or enterprise in order to prevent attacks from malicious nodes. Only the nodes certified by the consortium blockchain can act as the central nod. It is entitled to participate in the consensus algorithm and to act as the ledger in the chain. On the other hand, enterprise nodes upload data, while also serving as the ledger in the chain, but they are precluded from participating in the consensus algorithm.
For the consensus mechanism, HalalChain uses the PoL & T (Proof of Land & Time) algorithm. It uploads data based on time and land. Due to differences from the land and time in generating data, it limits the possibility of counterfeiting the data. The traceability of data about halal products would be produced based on time and land through marketing incentives.
Other key feature of the HalalChain is its comprehensive support to all RFID and NFC-based data acquisition devices in the industry. This feature provides the ability to tag and monitor physical objects and transmit data associated with them. It allows goods to be tracked throughout the supply chain and assures full integrity of readings. The Halal-Chain primarily collects data from tags, tracers, sensors, and other IoT devices.
The total number of Halal coins to be emitted is 1 billion, distributed as follows: