SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Blockchain
Sec. Blockchain in Industry
Evaluating Self-Sovereign Identity Solutions for Agricultural Supply Chains: A Systematic Review
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia
- 2Jazan University College of Engineering and Computer Sciences, Jazan, Saudi Arabia
- 3Shri Vishwakarma Skill University, Palwal, India
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Secure identity solutions are crucial to ensure traceability, transparency, and security for the agricultural supply chain. Ensuring a secure, privacy-preserving, and decentralized identity layer is essential for protecting stakeholders and maintaining trust in increasingly complex agricultural ecosystems. This paper provides a systematic review of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) solutions in three stages and five research questions (RQ) that guide the assessment and evaluation process. Initially, 1,229 articles were retrieved from multiple scientific databases, and 78 primary studies were selected according to predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Although blockchain has been widely studied for traceability, limited work has explicitly evaluated SSI frameworks within agricultural supply chains, revealing a significant gap in identity-focused research. This review assesses the current state of digital identity solutions, with a particular focus on those that utilize blockchain technology for agricultural supply chains. These solutions are evaluated based on the essential principles of self-sovereign identity—transparency, privacy and protection, user control, and decentralization. This review provides a detailed analysis of each SSI solution's strengths and weaknesses, along with insights and recommendations for developing technically robust, context-appropriate digital identity mechanisms. The review concludes by identifying key research gaps, outlining deployment-oriented recommendations, and highlighting the need for real-world pilot studies to validate the operational effectiveness of blockchain-based SSI systems in agricultural supply chains. Our systematic analysis reveals that while no existing SSI solution fully satisfies all the essential criteria for agricultural supply chains, Sovrin emerges as the most promising framework, excelling particularly in decentralization and privacy protection.
Keywords: Agricultural supply chain, Blockchain, Decentralized Trust, identity management, Privacy, Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), Transparency
Received: 15 Oct 2025; Accepted: 05 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Alar, Bharathy, Batra and Prasad. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Tariq Alar
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.