A Blockchain of Things System for Managing Handcrafted Products in a Cultural Industry

The handicraft sector is often seen as a symbol of a country's cultural identity, as it relies on specialized traditional techniques, skills, and knowledge that are often passed down through generations. As a result, ensuring the authenticity and integrity of this creative value has become a significant challenge, especially with the growth of counterfeiting techniques in this industry. Thus, integrating digital technologies into such sectors offers numerous operational benefits such as transparency, decentralization, data security, and authenticity needs. This paper presents an innovative approach for the handicraft sector, which exploits blockchain technology and the Internet of Things to guarantee the authenticity of cultural heritage. Through experimental evaluations comparing the decentralized blockchain-based system with traditional centralized methods using key metrics such as response time and transactions per second, this study reveals significant results. The statistical analysis reveals that the decentralized approach improves performance in terms of response times for verification and addition processes compared to the centralized system. Specifically, verification is approximately 4.66 times faster and addition is approximately 4.30 times faster in a decentralized system. However, transaction latency in the decentralized approach is approximately 38.21% higher than in the centralized system.