Blockchain: Enabling Trust on the Internet of Things

A systematic review of digital technology and innovation and its potential to address anti-corruption, transparency, and accountability in the pharmaceutical supply chain

“…The last technology category identified in this review made up a large volume of studies but remains a relatively newer technology solution. This group of articles discussed the potential role for blockchain-based solutions that use distributed ledger technology to optimize the pharmaceutical supply chain and procurement process [37,64,72,[82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89] (see Table 5 for examples). Blockchain is an emerging technology type, with its primary popularity in Fintech, cryptocurrency, and non-fungible token (NFT) applications, but has also seen widespread interest for business and private network applications, including from the pharmaceutical sector [86].…”

“…Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, Proof of Authority, Proof of Elapsed Time, etc.) that ensure mutual consent between all authorized nodes about what data is written to the blockchain, better ensuring data integrity about what is written on a shared ledger [84,87]. Additionally, blockchain can employ the aforementioned smart contracts to manage transactions according to the terms and conditions set out between parties, potentially reducing the need for intermediaries and introducing process improvement and cost savings [64,72,84].…”

“…failure of one or more components of the blockchain network does not cause the entire system to fail), and immutability (i.e. the ability of the blockchain ledger to be permanent and maintain an unalterable history of transactions, security, transparency, and traceability) [64,[82][83][84][85]88,89]. Some specific use cases that have emerged are monitoring and establishing provenance of medicines supply chain transactions, possibly enabling detection of counterfeit medicines, verifying products, detecting fraud and abuse in procurement and claims reimbursement, and enabling saleable returns as well as other regulatory solutions, such as post-market surveillance, addressing medicines shortages, and recall management [37,56,64,72,84,[87][88][89]93].…”

“…the ability of the blockchain ledger to be permanent and maintain an unalterable history of transactions, security, transparency, and traceability) [64,[82][83][84][85]88,89]. Some specific use cases that have emerged are monitoring and establishing provenance of medicines supply chain transactions, possibly enabling detection of counterfeit medicines, verifying products, detecting fraud and abuse in procurement and claims reimbursement, and enabling saleable returns as well as other regulatory solutions, such as post-market surveillance, addressing medicines shortages, and recall management [37,56,64,72,84,[87][88][89]93]. Most studies in our review underscored that blockchain-based drug traceability solutions could be a critical future tool for safeguarding the pharmaceutical supply chain from counterfeit products, as blockchain can identify the origin of data, as well as track, authenticate, and manage products throughout the supply chain while recording all the necessary information that is viewable to stakeholders operating in the supply chain [37,64,67,82,83,88,89,[93][94][95].…”

Improving Trust Levels in Wireless Networks Using Blockchain Powered Dempster Shaffer Route Optimization

“…These models aim at reducing computational complexity during blockchain deployment, thereby expanding their area of application. Blockchain models that use Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) [24], proof-of-idea (PoI) [25], and hybrid blockchains [26], are also observed to be useful when deploying trust-based IoT networks. These models showcase good attack resilience, and large-scale deployment ability due to their distributed nature.…”