Blockchain-based solution for secure and transparent pharmaceutical supply chain management using drugledger

The pharmaceutical supply chain continues to face significant challenges, including the circulation of counterfeit medicines, limited traceability, and insufficient transparency among stakeholders. To address these issues, this study presents a blockchain- and IPFS-based traceability framework designed to improve the secure tracking and verification of pharmaceutical products. The proposed system combines role-based smart contracts with decentralised off-chain storage to maintain product history and enable integrity validation using unique digital identifiers. The prototype was implemented in Ethereum-compatible environments. Repeated workflow measurements were obtained in the Remix VM environment, while Sepolia was used for deployment-level validation and public testnet verification. The system demonstrated the complete workflow, including participant registration, product enrollment, manufacturing, multi-stage transfer of ownership, and authenticity verification. Analysis of the execution outputs indicates that the core operations exhibit consistent gas consumption across repeated runs, offering clear insight into computational cost and system behaviour. The findings suggest that the proposed framework can serve as a viable foundation for improving traceability in pharmaceutical supply chains at the prototype level. However, further investigation is required to assess system performance under real-world deployment conditions, particularly with respect to scalability, latency, and large-scale operational constraints.