The agricultural supply chain plays a critical role in ensuring food security and sustainability; however, it continues to face challenges related to data fragmentation, limited transparency, and insufficient trust among participating stakeholders. Existing supply chain systems are primarily based on centralized identity and data management models, which introduce single points of failure, restrict auditability, and raise privacy concerns. More critically, the absence of decentralized and stakeholder-controlled identity mechanisms limits accountability and verifiable governance across agricultural ecosystems. In this work, we present Ziraai SSI, a blockchain-based self-sovereign identity (SSI) prototype designed to support identity-centric governance and trust establishment in agricultural supply chains. The proposed approach integrates blockchain-based trust anchoring with self-sovereign identity principles using decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials (VCs). Through this integration, stakeholders retain direct control over their digital identities while enabling cryptographically verifiable and privacy-preserving interactions across organizational boundaries. The system architecture follows a multi-layered design that addresses identity management, credential lifecycle handling, authentication, access control, and governance. To move beyond conceptual analysis, the framework is realized as a functional research prototype using standardized SSI technologies and an agent-based architecture. The implemented system supports end-to-end credential workflows, including secure connection establishment, credential issuance, selective disclosure, and proof-based verification, without reliance on centralized identity providers or authentication authorities. Experimental validation conducted in a controlled environment confirms correct execution of identity and credential lifecycles, decentralized authentication, and privacy-preserving verification. The evaluation focuses on functional validation within a controlled prototype environment and does not include large-scale scalability benchmarking. These results demonstrate the feasibility of identity-centric governance mechanisms in agricultural supply chains using standardized SSI technologies.
Alar et al. (Thu,) studied this question.