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Abstract

A blockchain can preserve the record of a supplychain interaction, but an intact ledger says nothing about whether the participant behind that record deserves trust in the next risk-sensitive transaction. Existing reputation designs concentrate on product evidence, global feedback aggregation, or review authenticity, and three problems that dominate permissioned supply chains receive far less attention: inflation through repeated bilateral interactions, the advantage gained from identity multiplicity, and decay rules that quietly punish honest participants whose history is simply sparse. We present REPUTATIONCHAIN, a participant trust framework that treats the blockchain as an evidence and provenance layer rather than as the source of trust itself.