Background Recently, the problem of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) safety has attracted attention worldwide. To prevent the spread of counterfeit drugs, it is necessary to establish a drug traceability system. A traditional drug traceability system can record the whole circulation process of drugs, from planting, production, processing, and warehousing to use by hospitals and patients. Once counterfeit drugs are found, they can be traced back to the source. However, traditional drug traceability systems have some drawbacks, such as failure to prevent tampering and facilitation of sensitive disclosure. Blockchain (including Bitcoin and Ethernet Square) is an effective technology to address the problems of traditional drug traceability systems. However, some risks impact the reliability of blockchain, such as information explosion, sensitive information leakage, and poor scalability. Objective To avoid the risks associated with the application of blockchain, we propose a lightweight block chain framework. Methods In this framework, both horizontal and vertical segmentations are performed when designing the blocks, and effective strategies are provided for both segmentations. For horizontal segmentation operations, the header and body of the blockchain are separated and stored in the blockchain, and the body is stored in the InterPlanetary File System. For vertical segmentation operations, the blockchain is cut off according to time or size. For the addition of new blocks, miners only need to copy the latest part of the blockchain and append the tail and vertical segmentation of the block through the consensus mechanism. Results Our framework could greatly reduce the size of the blockchain and improve the verification efficiency. Conclusions Experimental results have shown that the efficiency improves compared with ethernet when a new block is added to the blockchain and a search is conducted.

UNSTRUCTURED Recently, the problem of Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) safety has attracted the whole society’s attention. In order to prevent fake drugs from spread, it is necessary to establish drug traceability system. The traditional drug traceability system can record the whole circulation process of drugs from planting, production, processing and warehousing from hospitals to patients. Once fake drugs are found, they can be traced back to the source. However, there are some drawbacks in the traditional drug traceability system, such as failing to prevent tampering and causing sensitive disclosure easily. Although blockchain (including Bitcoin and Ethernet Square) is an effective technology to solve traditional drug traceability system’s problems. However, some risks makes it less reliable for blockchain such as information explosion, sensitive information leakage and poor scalability. To avoid these application risks, we propose a kind of lightweight block chain framework.This framework performed both horizontal and vertical segmentations in designing the blocks, and provided effective strategies for both segmentions, respectively. For horizontal segmentation operations, the header and body of the blockchain are separated and stored in the blockchain, and the body is stored in the IPFS (Inter Planetary File System). For vertical segmentation operations, block chain is cut off according to time or size. For new blocks’ addition, miners only need to copy the latest part of the blockchain and append the tail and vertical segmentation of the block through the consensus mechanism. Our proposed framework could greatly reduce the size of the blockchain, and improve the verification efficiency. Experimental results show that the efficiency improves when a new block is added to the blockchain and conducting search compared with Ethernet.