How ForesTrust Put the U.S. Wood Supply Chain on a Public Blockchain
Here’s the case study at a glance:
ForesTrust, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities
Forestry and forest products: pulp and paper, hardwood lumber, wood bioenergy, biochar
United States, with international reach through member supply chains
Chainparency, using its GoTrace application. IBM during the 2019 proof of concept. Michigan State University Forest Carbon and Climate Program on carbon methodology.
Public ledger, with supply chain records written as hashed entries
Proof of concept concluded late 2019. ForesTrust, LLC introduced October 2020. Network piloted and launched 2021. Chainparency collaboration announced October 2022. Leadership Council announced June 2023.
A working industry consortium with founding members spanning pulp and paper, hardwood lumber, biochar and wood bioenergy, plus federal grant support
This is an all-too common scenario: a log leaves a stand, gets scaled at a landing, rides a truck to a mill, and becomes lumber, pulp, pellets, or packaging.
Somewhere further along, a buyer in another country asks whether the wood was legally and responsibly harvested. The answer lies in paperwork that has changed hands five or six times, and it’s not a simple one.
In 2020 the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities set out to fix exactly that, at the level of the industry rather than the individual company.
The result was ForesTrust, a blockchain network built to track wood and wood fibre from forest to consumer, with founding members drawn from across the forest products sector.
The project is worth studying for anyone whose business depends on proving where material came from, partly because of what it built and partly because of what changed about it along the way.
The Challenge: A Supply Chain That “Forgets” Where Wood Came From
The problem that comes hand in hand with this supply chain is illegal logging. INTERPOL estimates that forestry crime accounts for between 15 and 30 per cent of all timber traded globally, with document fraud and misdeclaration among the mechanisms that make it work.
Illegal material, however, does not usually move through illegal markets. It instead gets laundered into legitimate ones, and by the time it reaches a mill the paperwork looks ordinary.
For US operators the specific pressure came from the Lacey Act. The 2008 amendments extended it to plants and plant products and made it unlawful to trade in illegally harvested timber, which helped stem the trade.
The Endowment, however, has pointed out that the standard of due care the Act requires proved difficult to interpret in practice. That leaves companies uncertain about how much diligence was enough and enforcement bodies without a consistent test. Buyers wanted assurance, and the available assurance was a declaration form.
Certification created a second problem, which is administrative rather than criminal. Chain of custody schemes work, and they generate a large volume of documentation that has to be maintained, reconciled, and produced at audit. For a mill drawing fibre from hundreds of suppliers, that reconciliation is a standing cost.
And, of course, underneath both sits the structural issue. Wood fibre is blended. Pulp from many tracts becomes one batch, lumber from one shipment gets graded and split across several orders, and residuals from a sawmill become feedstock for something else entirely. Once material is mixed, provenance can only be reconstructed from records, and those records sit in different systems owned by different companies with no shared view between them.
The Solution: One Shared Ledger Across Competing Companies
ForesTrust was structured as a consortium rather than a product. The Endowment, a not-for-profit public charity working on the health of working forests and forest-reliant communities, was a credible neutral party to convene it.
That is very important; the participants are competitors who would normally never hand their supply chain data to one another.
A unique identifier attached to the wood
Felled trees or wood products such as pulp are assigned a unique blockchain identifier, linked to information including the location the wood came from and any sustainability certifications attached to it.
As the material moves along the supply chain, the record moves with it, registering each change of hands, so every subsequent buyer can see the full history rather than the last declaration in the sequence.
Handoffs recorded by scan
The network runs on Chainparency’s GoTrace application. A load is issued a QR code identifier that can be scanned from any mobile device.
When a load arrives, the receiving party scans it and accepts it into their possession, and tracking continues until the next party scans and accepts in turn. Chain of custody becomes a sequence of scans instead of a sequence of documents, and each scan is time-stamped and recorded on the ledger.
The deployment requirement is deliberately low: a smartphone and access to a printer are enough to get a first-mile operator onto the network.
Hashing for confidentiality on a public ledger
The design detail worth borrowing is how ForesTrust reconciles two things that look incompatible.
Companies need their commercial data kept private. Auditors, regulators, and buyers need to be able to verify claims. ForesTrust writes movements through the supply chain as hashed blocks, which preserves confidentiality while leaving the record available for compliance, auditing, certification, and information requests.
Verifiability and disclosure turn out to be separable, and that separation is exactly what makes a shared ledger acceptable to competitors.
From a permissioned network to a public one
ForesTrust did not start where it ended up. Research into using blockchain for proof of origin and certification management concluded in late 2019, and when ForesTrust, LLC was introduced in October 2020 it was described as a permissioned network built with IBM, giving members shared technical control over a neutral infrastructure.
Two years later the Endowment announced a collaboration with Chainparency, and the network moved onto a public ledger with GoTrace as the capture layer.
The shift is instructive. A permissioned consortium chain solves the confidentiality problem by restricting who can read the ledger. A public chain with hashed entries solves it differently, by restricting what the ledger contains.
The second approach removes the need to run and govern private infrastructure, which lowers the cost of joining, and cost of entry is the binding constraint when the network needs small landowners and single-mill operators as much as it needs large corporations.
Carbon accounting as a second data layer
The Endowment also received a $250,000 USDA Forest Service Wood Innovations grant, matched with $250,000 of its own funds, to work with the Michigan State University Forest Carbon and Climate Program on methods for tracking stored carbon through the value chain, with the intention of building those methods into ForesTrust.
The same movement data that proves provenance can carry carbon and other environmental attributes. What you record at the first mile determines which claims you can support later.
The Results
The clearest outcome is the consortium itself. By June 2023 the ForesTrust Leadership Council comprised Domtar, Wakefield BioChar, Thompson Appalachian Hardwoods and Enviva alongside the Endowment, with Chainparency providing the technology.
(It is worth noting that getting a paper and packaging producer, a hardwood lumber manufacturer, a biochar producer and a wood bioenergy company onto one ledger took more persuasion than engineering.)
There were live deployments rather than announcements alone. In April 2023 Wakefield BioChar began using ForesTrust to track inbound wood waste shipments from timber mills, the feedstock for a soil amendment made by pyrolysis. Thompson Appalachian joined in the same month and set out to pilot the technology across selected product supply chains over the following year, with EU timber legislation cited as part of the motivation. Federal grant support added outside validation.
Unfortunately, the kind of number a case study usually wants is not available. The Endowment and its partners have not published throughput figures, adoption rates, volumes tracked, or independent evaluation of cost or accuracy, and most substantive public reporting on the network dates from 2023 and 2024.
The honest reading is that ForesTrust demonstrated feasibility and assembled a credible coalition, and that its performance at scale is not yet a matter of public record.
Key Takeaways
Traceability across an industry is primarily a coordination problem rather than a technology problem. The hard part of ForesTrust was not writing records to a ledger, but getting competitors to agree on a shared one. Which, of course, is why a neutral non-profit convener mattered so much.
Confidentiality and public verifiability are compatible. Hashing lets a record be checked without being read. Any organisation that has ruled out public ledgers on the grounds of commercial sensitivity is probably reasoning about the wrong architecture.
Architecture decisions are not permanent. ForesTrust moved from a permissioned IBM network to a public chain when the trade-offs became clearer, and treated that as a design correction. Traceability projects that treat the first technical choice as irreversible tend to stall when it turns out to be wrong.
Regulation is the forcing function. The Lacey Act shaped the original case, and members have pointed at EU timber legislation as a reason to move now. Traceability tends to get funded when somebody outside the company starts asking for evidence.
Finally, the ledger only preserves what the first mile gives it. A blockchain record of a load is a faithful, permanent copy of whatever was captured when that load was created. If the origin, species, volume, or certification status was recorded loosely at the landing or the mill gate, the network carries that error forward with the same integrity guarantee it applies to everything else. The point of capture is where a traceability system is won or lost.
How to Build Verifiable First-Mile Records With VerusTrust Forms
Granted, most organisations reading this will not be launching an industry consortium. The more common position is being a participant in someone else’s supply chain, or preparing to answer a customer or a regulator who wants evidence of origin. But the same logic applies here, too: the work starts with the record created in the field, before any network gets involved.
VerusTrust Forms is a field data collection platform with optional blockchain verification. Teams capture structured records wherever the work happens, and a cryptographic fingerprint of each record can be anchored to a public blockchain.
The relationship to a network like ForesTrust is complementary rather than competitive. ForesTrust moves verified records between companies. Forms is one way of making sure the record entering that chain was captured properly in the first place, and it stands on its own for organisations that need defensible field records, even if there is no consortium involved.
A cryptographic hash of each submission is anchored to a public blockchain such as Ethereum, while the data itself stays encrypted on your account.
This is the same reasoning ForesTrust applies with hashed blocks: the record becomes verifiable without becoming visible.
Every submission carries coordinates captured at the point of record, which is what binds a source declaration or a harvest record to a place.
Origin data is the first attribute any traceability scheme asks for, and it is the hardest to reconstruct later.
Coffee often is grown in places with little or no connectivity. VerusTrust Forms allows teams to capture records offline, at the farm, the washing station, or the mill, and sync once a connection returns. Anchoring can run on sync, so remote conditions never weaken the integrity of the record.
Control who submits, reviews, and approves across landowners, contractors, hauliers, and mill staff. Where several organisations write to the same set of records, this is what keeps the chain of custody clean.
Species and product dropdowns, numeric fields with plausible limits for volume and weight, mandatory photographs, and signatures at handoff. Constrained inputs are what stop first-mile data arriving as free text nobody can reconcile.
A central view of what has come in, from which crew, at which site. Records export to standard spreadsheet formats such as XLSX for certification files, client reporting, and internal reconciliation.
The data records run on Microsoft Azure with enterprise-grade security and data residency options, ensuring your data stays safe and compliant.
Start Recording Origin Data You Can Stand Behind
ForesTrust is a bet that the wood industry will be asked to prove its claims, and that the proof should travel with the material instead of trailing behind it on paper.
That bet looks well placed. The organisations best positioned for it are the ones whose field records are already accurate, located, dated, and hard to alter, because everything downstream inherits whatever the first mile hands over.
Our guide to blockchain traceability explains how on-chain anchoring works in more detail.
If you are ready to build your first source declaration or harvest record, you can start your own pilot program today. Design a form, capture data in the field, and anchor each submission to a public blockchain so anyone can verify it later.
Blockchain verification is included on every VerusTrust Forms plan, including the affordable Starter tier.