Decentralized Drug Transaction Tracking: A Novel Hybrid Blockchain-IPFS Platform

Counterfeit drugs are a serious global problem that poses threats to public health. It occurs when falsified or counterfeit drugs are intentionally manufactured and introduced into the pharmaceutical supply chain, masquerading as genuine products. This is due to the complexity of the supply chain that involves independent entities. As a result, a drug transits through several stages before reaching the patient. Current drug management systems are centralized, thus creating data transparency and authenticity risks within the supply chain. To bypass this issue, we propose in this paper a novel hybrid and distributed drug transaction tracking platform that leverages a combination of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) protocol and Ethereum blockchain. Relying on IPFS guarantees the integrity of drug traceability data, while the blockchain ensures the authenticity of this data. We developed our platform and, through experiments, we prove that our method is more efficient, in terms of process costs, than the conventional blockchain-based drug tracking system.