Why Supply Chain Sovereignty Requires a Public Good

Permissioned chains create walled gardens. They optimize for a single consortium's efficiency, not the entire industry's interoperability. This replicates the siloed data problem that blockchain was built to dismantle.

Sovereignty requires open protocols. A public good like a shared data availability layer (e.g., Celestia, EigenDA) provides a neutral foundation. Competing logistics firms can build proprietary applications on top without ceding control to a rival-led consortium.

Evidence: TradeLens, a Maersk/IBM consortium, shut down after failing to achieve critical mass. Rival carriers refused to join a platform controlled by a competitor. An open, modular stack avoids this by separating the base layer from competitive applications.

Sovereignty is a technical property defined by control over execution and data. Relying on a single entity's RPC, like Alchemy or Infura, creates a central point of failure and censorship. This architecture surrenders sovereignty to a third party's operational and economic interests.

Neutral infrastructure is non-negotiable. Protocols like Uniswap and Aave require a credibly neutral settlement layer—Ethereum—to function without platform risk. The same principle applies upstream: the data and execution layers feeding these protocols must be public goods, akin to The Graph or EigenDA, not proprietary services.

Private APIs create rent extraction. A supply chain built on closed infrastructure, like many current rollup sequencers, allows the operator to impose arbitrary fees and control transaction ordering. This extracts value from the applications built on top, violating the economic sovereignty of the end protocol.

Evidence: The rapid adoption of shared sequencer networks like Espresso and decentralized RPC networks like POKT demonstrates market demand for neutral, composable infrastructure. Their growth is a direct rejection of the vertically integrated, rent-seeking model.

Private chains are rent-seeking enterprises. Their business model depends on capturing value within a walled garden, which directly opposes the permissionless composability that drives DeFi innovation. A protocol like Uniswap cannot permissionlessly integrate with a private chain's liquidity.

Public good infrastructure is non-rivalrous. A shared, open data layer like Celestia or an interoperability standard like IBC creates value for all participants. This positive-sum network effect is impossible for a private chain, which operates as a zero-sum extractor.

Evidence: The total value locked in private, permissioned enterprise blockchains is negligible compared to public L1/L2 ecosystems. The dominant financial primitives—Aave, Compound, MakerDAO—exist exclusively on public, sovereign chains where incentives align for open participation.

Privacy is a feature, not a requirement. Confidential supply chain data can be hashed and anchored to a public ledger like Ethereum or Celestia, providing cryptographic proof of provenance without revealing sensitive commercial terms. This is the model used by Provenance Blockchain for asset-backed finance.

Speed is a scaling problem, not a design flaw. High-throughput chains like Solana or app-specific rollups on Arbitrum Nitro process thousands of transactions per second. The bottleneck is data availability, which public networks like EigenLayer and Avail solve.

Private, permissioned chains create data silos. A supply chain controlled by a single consortium, like IBM's Hyperledger, defeats the purpose of a global, interoperable system. It reintroduces the trust problem blockchains were built to solve.

Evidence: The failure of TradeLens, a private blockchain consortium led by Maersk and IBM, proves that closed networks lack the network effects and credible neutrality required for industry-wide adoption.

Private networks create data silos. A corporation's permissioned blockchain is a marketing term for a slow database. It defeats the purpose of interoperability and provable state, locking data within a single legal jurisdiction and trust model.

Sovereignty requires exit rights. A truly sovereign supply chain must be able to migrate providers without catastrophic data loss. This is only possible with public data availability layers like Celestia or EigenDA and open standards like IBC or LayerZero.

Evidence: Walmart Canada's blockchain pilot with DLT Labs reduced disputes by 97%. This efficiency came from shared data, but the network's private nature means its benefits are not composable with the global trade finance ecosystem on public chains like Polygon or Celo.