With crab season in full swing in China, the search giant Baidu teams up with Top Crab, an established hairy crab brand, using blockchain technology to track and authenticate the famed Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs, local news portal tech.163.com reported on September 28.

Located in east China’s Jiangsu province, the Yangcheng Lake is home to special freshwater crabs famed for their creamy texture. However, over the past years, the huge demand for the limited number of Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs drives profiteers to sell counterfeit crustaceans that actually come from other waters, despite annual crackdowns by the authorities and local crab industry associations. Top Crab is a member of the Yangcheng crab industry association.

Baidu has recently launched a crab traceability applet built upon its proprietary blockchain, called XuperChain, to tackle counterfeit products. After fishermen catch crabs, Baidu will move each crab data, including the certificates of origin, its image,and exclusive barcode onto XuperChain.

Customers can scan the barcode on crabs’ shells by using the traceability applet in Baidu App to obtain relevant information so that any data discrepancy with the counterfeit products can be easily spotted.Besides, when customers enter “blockchain hairy crab” or any other related keywords in Baidu App, they will be exposed to the recommendation of high quality products and trustworthy merchants.

This is second blockchain application built upon the XuperChain following Baidu Totom, a blockchain-based photo service which helps photographers protect themselves from copyright infringements. According to Baidu’s blockchain white paper released on September 26,  XuperChain is able to support more than 10,000 transactions per second through inter-chain parallel technology and a stereoscopic network.

The company’s blockchain lab director said Baidu is committed to creating a neutral decentralized traceability platform to build trusted connections among Baidu,  product suppliers, industry associations and rights protection agencies. Different from other e-commerce platforms, Baidu, acting as a third-party traceability service provider, will focus on products’ quality supervision.

In addition to Baidu, the online retail giant Suning, together with the Yangcheng Lake Hairy Crab Association, has also introduced the blockchain-based traceability and anti-counterfeiting system to guarantee the specifications and quality of the hairy crabs from the source.