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Walmart Joins Pharmaceutical Tracking Blockchain Consortium MediLedger

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Walmart Joins Pharmaceutical Tracking Blockchain Consortium MediLedger

The U.S. retail giant Walmart announced its participation in MediLedger, a blockchain developer in the pharmaceutical industry. MediLedger believes that blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry, bridging the gap between drug suppliers and customers, while also establishing a bridge for each transaction and secure record-keeping to ensure the authenticity of the entire supply chain.

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According to a report by CoinDesk, a spokesperson for the Arkansas-based company confirmed that Walmart is participating in this initiative, indicating Walmart's deepening commitment to blockchain technology. Additionally, Walmart is also a key participant in IBM Food Trust.

Data Digitization

IBM Food Trust is built on blockchain, enabling all network participants to benefit from a more secure, smarter, and sustainable food ecosystem.

Data digitization can provide a more efficient cross-supply chain operation, allowing stakeholders such as farms, stores, and ultimately consumers to access supply chain data instantly through authorization. Once the complete history and current location of individual food items, along with accompanying information such as certificates, test data, and temperature data, are uploaded to the blockchain, they are immediately available within seconds.

Walmart believes that by integrating IBM blockchain, its vegetable suppliers can bring similar supply chain influence to MediLedger, whose members already include Pfizer and the three major pharmaceutical wholesalers McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, and Cardinal Health.

Unlike IBM Food Trust, MediLedger uses the enterprise edition of Ethereum blockchain and a proof-of-authority consensus mechanism. Led by San Francisco-based blockchain company Chronicled, which recently completed a $16 million funding round earlier this year. MediLedger is set to initiate a pilot project with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in early June.

Proof-of-Authority
Proof-of-Authority (POA) is a reputation-based consensus algorithm proposed by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2017. POA uses certified account identities as block validator nodes, leading to fewer validations, high throughput, and cost savings compared to POW and POS. However, it has a slightly centralized nature. Representative projects based on POA include POA Network and Microsoft's cloud platform Azure.

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