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Top1. Introduction
Agriculture is a key industry to which countries all over the world attach importance and has an important impact on the society, economy and environment. So far, to achieve the sustainable development of agriculture, many researchers have proposed to transform traditional agriculture into e-agriculture through the implementation of information and communication technology (ICT) (Lin et al., 2017; Chen et al., 2023). Multiple studies have shown that blockchain technology combined with sustainable practices can help achieve smart and sustainable agriculture (Akella et al., 2023). However, due to bias and lack of transparency and trust, the information in the electronic agricultural traceability system is not fully reliable and is subject to tampering. The literature shows that the adoption of blockchain technology is slow to improve sustainable supply chain performance in an agricultural context (Zkik et al., 2022). Based on the application of ICT in agriculture, it is difficult to dispose of these troubles and actualize the sustainable development of agriculture. Due to the characteristics of the blockchain, such as decentralization, non-tampering and traceability, in a real sense, blockchain can meet the needs of commercial applications. Blockchain-related research has become an interdisciplinary study, not limited to the scope of computing, engineering, or encryption (Zheng & Lu, 2022). The use of blockchain can alleviate the shortcomings of e-agriculture in information sharing, data security, privacy maintenance and other aspects, and promote the sustainable development of agriculture (Feng et al., 2019; Razzaq et al., 2022).
Although blockchain has attracted wide attention in academia, the application of blockchain in agriculture is still in the exploration stage, and the existing research mainly has the following deficiencies. Firstly, the existing research focuses more on the utility of the blockchain features on a certain part of the agricultural supply chain. However, because the healthy development of agriculture includes many aspects such as economy, society and environment, it is difficult to explain the application of blockchain in agriculture from a single point of view, and the existing research lacks systematization and sustainability. Therefore, the study needs to apply blockchain technology to e-agriculture from the perspective of agricultural supply chain based on triple bottom line and explore a hierarchical theoretical framework. Secondly, in the application process, blockchain will work with all the subjects in the agricultural supply chain at the same time, which requires multiple actors to cooperate and interact. But few studies have explored a multi-agent collaborative coordinated application system by combining multiple stakeholders in the agricultural supply chain. Thirdly, the practical application of blockchain in agriculture lacks research at the level of alliance chain. The credibility of information of private chain is not reliable enough, while the information of public chain is insufficient in terms of privacy security (Morkunas et al., 2019; Paliaga et al., 2023). Finally, the characteristics of complete “decentralization” bring greater barrier to system design (McPhee and Ljutic, 2017; Muscarella et al., 2023). Relatively speaking, alliance chains have the characteristics of “partial decentralization”, which is more suitable for the application and popularization in the real economy.
Based on the above, in order to assess the application of blockchain in e-agriculture on the basis of an alliance chain, this paper has done the following researches. First of all, a number of effective criteria are put forward according to the theory. Second, we use exploratory factor analysis to divide effective standards into three levels: economic, social and environmental, so as to establish a blockchain-based sustainable development system of e-agriculture including 14 standards from three aspects. Third, this paper synthetically applies DEMATEL, the fuzzy set theory and ISM to make multi-attribute decisions. At last, based on stakeholder theory and the above analysis, this paper constructs an innovative service UIS application system.