Blockchain technology in herbal medicines: Applications, trends, and prospects

The quality and safety of Herbal medicines (HMs) not only affect the development of the industry chain, but also the life safety rights and interests of patients. Traditional HMs supply chains suffer from opaque information and easy tampering, but blockchain intervention can significantly improve the security and traceability of information. The combination of blockchain and herb chain will be the future trend. This paper uses bibliometric statistics to analyze the practical application scenarios of blockchain and summarizes the challenges faced in HMs supply chain. It further explores the application potential of blockchain in the field of HMs and designs a traceability system for HMs based on blockchain technology. A large number of literature surveys found that the application scope of blockchain in HMs is relatively small, and comprehensive coverage of blockchain applications has a high coefficient of difficulty. This paper provides more possibilities for the application of blockchain in HMs, which will promote the development of a benign cycle of the HMs industry chain and protect the rights and interests of consumers.