Traceability System for Rare Chinese Herbal Medicines Based on Blockchain Structure

The difficulty of tracing the process of planting, processing, quality inspection, storage, transportation and sales of precious Chinese herbal medicines can be well solved by using the blockchain that is characterized by decentralization, tamper resistance and distributed storage. In this paper, we discuss how to design a traceability system for rare Chinese herbal medicine with double-chain structure by using the high efficiency of private blockchain and the extensibility of consortium blockchain to store the detailed information of each process in the interplanetary file system (IPFS), store the Hash value of each production process traceability information in the private blockchain, and record the transaction identification ID in the private blockchain in the previous stage in the traceability information in the next stage, so that consumers can get the complete traceability information of rare Chinese herbal medicines by combining the traceability information of the sales stage with the IPFS. By linking the Hash value of the traceability information of the final sales stage to the consortium blockchain as a transaction, the safety and reliability of the scheme are enhanced. The private blockchain is used to collect and track the traceability information, while the consortium blockchain is to tamper with and verify the traceability information.