NFT-IoT Pharma Chain : IoT Drug traceability system based on Blockchain and Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

Abstract

The public’s health depends on a reliable drug supply chain. Recently, the number of drug counterfeit has increased drastically, resulting in thousands of victims suffering from poisoning and/or treatment failures, which have resulted in new expectations on drug supply chain traceability. Indeed, the drug supply chain involves many parties having heterogeneous interests and are usually reluctant to share traceability data with each other. Furthermore, existing traceability and provenance systems for drug supply chains suffer from separated data storage, lack of information sharing transparency, and trust. Decentralized blockchain-based solutions are advocated to address these limitations by realizing decentralized trustless systems. In this work, we present a fully decentralized, blockchain-based drug traceability solution, worthy of seamless integrating IoT devices throughout the chain. It uses both smart contracts and decentralized off-chain storage to remove the need for middleman and to provide trusted, secure and immutable transaction history. Moreover, to preserve the traceability of drugs, it ensures and enforces data provenance and data integrity in the proposed IoT environment by using blockchain Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). We give a test and validation of the approach’s effectiveness in enhancing drug traceability supply chains, as well as an analysis of the approach’s costs and security.