Trustworthy Electronic Business Collaboration in Supply Chain Finance: A Convergent Architecture of Distributed Ledgers, Privacy-Preserving Computation, Trusted Execution, and Digital Credentials

Abstract

Supply chain finance (SCF) promises to convert the creditworthiness of large anchor buyers into liquidity for their smaller suppliers, yet in practice the same information asymmetries that create the financing gap also prevent its closure. This paper argues that the binding constraint is no longer the availability of digital technology but the absence of an assurance architecture capable of making a receivable verifiable, singular, and enforceable across organisational and jurisdictional boundaries. We develop and defend a convergent architecture—here termed TCCE (Trust Anchor, Credential, Confidential Computing, and Execution layers)—that composes four technological families rather than treating them as substitutes: permissioned distributed ledgers and smart contracts as a shared registry and deterministic state machine; privacy-preserving computation (secure multi-party computation, federated learning, homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs) as the mechanism that keeps raw commercial and personal data inside its originating domain; trusted computing (hardware roots of trust, remote attestation, trusted execution environments) as the mechanism that makes computation itself auditable; and digital credentials (decentralised identifiers, verifiable credentials, reliable electronic signatures, and electronic transferable records) as the bridge between cryptographic state and legal fact. Using accounts-receivable electronic certificates (ARECs) in China as the empirical setting—an instrument whose outstanding balance reached RMB 2.75 trillion and whose financing balance reached RMB 2.08 trillion in the first quarter of 2026 under a newly tightened regulatory regime—we show that duplicate financing, unverifiable trade backgrounds, failed credit pass-through, and cross-platform non-interoperability are four manifestations of a single underlying defect: the absence of a continuously verifiable link between a business event, a legal right, and a payment obligation. We formalize this defect, derive conditions under which verifiable disclosure strictly dominates both full concealment and full disclosure, specify an implementation blueprint with lifecycle controls, and evaluate the architecture against a stated adversary model, Chinese and international compliance requirements, and unit-economics constraints. The paper contributes a design theory for trustworthy inter-organisational collaboration that is simultaneously technically executable, legally grounded, and economically sustainable, and it identifies why a substantial share of prior trade-finance consortia failed on governance and adoption rather than on cryptography.