Provenance: proving where things come from

What's going on

Professor Bina Ramamurthy literally wrote the Coursera blockchain and DeFi specialization that's reached hundreds of thousands of learners - so when she moves blockchain out of finance, it's worth following. Her favorite image: blockchain is like a railway track. Bitcoin was the first train to run on it, and it's still running, but the same track can carry an express train, a goods train, a slow train. "The real value," she insists, "is the apps - it's not about blockchain." In five years, she predicts, nobody will say the word "blockchain" any more than we say "internet" today; it just becomes part of the fabric.

She frames the whole field around three D's: decentralization (she's a US citizen in Vienna teaching students in Chennai), disintermediation (none of them share an organization or middleman), and distributed ledger. Then she turns to supply chains - which, she notes, are also chains. A supply chain doesn't just move products; it moves promises of origin, safety, and compliance. When her own book got stuck in a broken supply chain between Singapore, the US, and Chennai, buyers blamed the publisher and trust evaporated - that's the problem blockchain fixes.

Her core mechanism is provenance tracking: store a product's unique hash on the blockchain at its origin and verify it at the destination. Because old records can't be secretly rewritten (Tier I), the chain of custody becomes auditable end to end - vital for airplane parts, medicines that must stay at the right temperature, and anything where a tampered component risks human life. She challenged the students not to merely "computerize" supply chains but to disrupt them - the way a mobile phone obliterated the landline.