# A Non-Fungible Token Solution for the Track and Trace of Pharmaceutical Supply Chain
###### Abstract  
Industry 4.0 is leading society into a new era characterized by smart communications between consumers and enterprises. While entertainment and fashion brands aim to consolidate their identities, increasing consumers' participation in new, engaging, and immersive experiences, other industry sectors such as food and drugs are called to adhere to stricter regulations to increase the quality assurance of their processes. The pharmaceutical industry is inherently one of the most regulated sectors because the safety, integrity, and conservation along the distribution network are the main pillars for guaranteeing the efficacy of drugs for the general public. Favoured by Industry 4.0 incentives, pharmaceutical serialization has become a must in the last few years and is now in place worldwide. In this paper, a decentralized solution based on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which can improve the track and trace capability of the standard serialization process, is presented. Non-fungible tokens are minted in the blockchain and inherit all the advantages provided by this technology. As blockchain technology is becoming more and more popular, adoption of track and trace will increase tremendously. Focusing on the pharmaceutical industry's use of track and trace, this paper presents the concepts and architectural elements necessary to support the non-fungible token solution, culminating in the presentation of a use case with a prototypical application. t +
Footnote †: journal: Applied  
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* Enabling a custom mass production without significantly increasing overall production costs;
* More flexible and friendlier working environment (due to robotics, M2M, etc. );
* More efficient use of natural resources and energy. Moreover [5], as the applications and use cases of I4.0 increase, what has emerged is that new paradigms and management styles for conducting the business of the enterprises have been proposed, especially in the product development [6], manufacturing activities, conception of new services [7], improvement of ergonomics [8], and management of the supply chain. Among the above, the track and trace process of the pharmaceutical products is analysed in this paper. Track and trace of pharmaceutical products is very important: it has been estimated that counterfeit drugs cause over 100,000 deaths annually and over $200 billion of loss in the pharmaceutical industry [9]. To fight this phenomenon and prevent falsified medicinal products from entering the legal distribution chain, the 2011/62/EU Directive [10] introduces new regulations for pharmaceutical industries and distributors to enable a process of serialization that involves all the actors of the supply chain in the operations of production, packaging, tracing, and distribution. At the current state of the art, the centralized architecture on top of this regulation is not free from weaknesses and it fails at fulfilling all the requirements for the implementation of robust anticounterfeiting measures. The latter, on the other hand, can be achieved by integrating the current serialization technologies of I4.0 with other paradigms, such as blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), that favour the interoperability, communication, and trust among the actors of the distribution network up to the final consumers. This paper is organized as follows: in Section 2, a literature review framing the state of the art of Industry 4.0 applications is discussed; a breakdown of the main technologies, advantages, and complexities in several industrial fields is thus presented. Section 3 introduces the main concepts of the track and trace and serialization process for the pharmaceutical industry, highlighting what are the issues that can be overcome by exploiting the integration of cutting-edge concepts such as blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) together with Industry 4.0 applications. Section 4 describes the main concepts behind the blockchain technology, including Web3 and NFT.