Walmart Joins Pharmaceutical-Tracking Blockchain Consortium MediLedger

Big-box retail giant Walmart has joined MediLedger, a consortium building a blockchain for tracking the provenance of pharmaceuticals.

The move represents a deepening of Walmart's involvement with blockchain technology.

Separately, the retailer is a key participant in IBM's Food Trust, a system for tracking fresh produce through the supply chain that's built on the Hyperledger Fabric platform.

Walmart has insisted that its suppliers of leafy greens integrate the IBM blockchain, and it should bring similar supply-chain clout to MediLedger, whose members already include pharmaceutical manufacturers such as Pfizer and the three largest pharmaceutical wholesalers, McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, and Cardinal Health.

Unlike Food Trust, MediLedger uses an enterprise version of the ethereum blockchain, built with a modified version of the Parity client and a consensus mechanism called proof of authority.

The consortium is spearheaded by San Francisco-based blockchain firm Chronicled, which closed a $16 million funding round earlier this year.

Walmart joins as MediLedger prepares to kick off a pilot project with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in early June.

The agency is testing various approaches to creating an interoperable, digitized system for tracking and verifying prescription drugs, something Congress has mandated it deliver by 2023.

Now the expanded group will start work on the more broad-ranging tracking of all pharma products which involves interoperable data and packaging serialization.

Garvin said nodes are distributed and operated by industry participants and technology providers, but that data privacy is being addressed with zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic method that allows someone to prove something is true about a set of data without exposing the data itself.