The Asia-based medical services company Zuellig Pharma has developed a blockchain platform to improve its vaccine tracking service and prevent accidents that could compromise the public’s health.

eZTracker, Zuellig Pharma’s management system, guarantees the authenticity of vaccines, preventing the smuggling of medical products and the misappropriation of vaccines and supplies during their official distribution.

How eZTracker Can Prevent Vaccine Frauds

Zuellig Pharma’s eZTracker software guarantees transparency across the entire supply chain by recording the movements of each package from manufacture to delivery and administration.

Because it uses blockchain technology, the information is auditable in real-time, offers instant results, and does not require an intermediary. Also, it is censorship-resistant and immune to deliberate tampering with the reported data.

Daniel Laverick, vice-president and head of digital and data solutions at Zuellig Pharma, explained that in addition to knowing a product’s route and verifying its authenticity, users have the ability to reliably obtain a plethora of valuable information.

“For products registered with eZTracker and depending on the needs of our pharma principals, patients can scan the 2D data matrix on the product packaging to verify key product information like expiry date, temperature, and provenance through its app powered by blockchain,”

Laverick believes Hong Kong could be a key market for positioning eZTracker as a healthcare system monitoring tool. Zuellig Pharma has a customer base of more than 1,000 healthcare facilities in 13 countries in Asia.

Blockchain Goes Beyond Crypto

The use of blockchain technology in the field of logistics and medicine is not new. As the industry matures, developers have launched proofs-of-concept and practical applications that give distributed ledger and blockchain technologies comparative advantages over approaches that rely on human operators or need to work with central servers. Some initiatives have proven to be succesful, and some have struggled a lot to prove their worth, but the use of blockchain technology diversifies among different industries as time marches on.

For example, in the medical field, MediLedger is a startup that is offering a service similar to eZTracker but to a much wider audience, guaranteeing the authenticity and validity of medicines coming from affiliated entities.

Similarly, during the COVID boom, several proposals for COVID passports using blockchain to guarantee information about the spread of the virus were explored, recording people’s movements and travels under supervision.

And there are already applications in food, energy distribution, and even the footwear industry —with the shoes company New Balance using Cardano to prevent counterfeit.

Kickstarter, the world’s most famous crowdfunding platform, wants to dive headfirst into the blockchain world, changing the technology behind its business model while still offering the same user experience.

The firm explained in an official blog post that this decision is part of an effort to find better tools to fulfill its mission of bringing creative projects to life through community collaboration.

Kickstarter Wants to be Decentralized —And Green

Kickstarter is not becoming a complete blockchain initiative just yet. To begin this new phase, the corporation created an independent organization responsible for building an open-source protocol that emulates the functionality of Kickstarter’s core platform but in a decentralized way.

This independent organization will be initially funded by Kickstarter PBC. Still, no details have been revealed about the amount of funds allocated to this new initiative or its name.

Kickstarter PBC was the Public Benefit Corporation created after Kickstarter Inc migrated its business model in 2015.

Once the independent organization has concluded with all the necessary preparations, Kickstarter will then migrate its website to the new infrastructure. Kickstarter assures that users will not feel any change even though the technology will shift to a decentralized model.

Kickstarter will work on top of Celo, a carbon negative, Proof-of-Stake blockchain focused on minimizing environmental impact and capable of processing 7 million transactions per ton of CO2 emitted.

Just for reference, according to Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, it takes 191 tons of CO2 to mine 1 BTC, and a Bitcoin block concentrates between 1200 and 2400 transactions per block according to Ycharts data.

DAOs and Crowdfunding

Kickstarter’s move comes as a perfect fit. The platform’s motivation is based precisely on decentralized decision-making. Funds are not deposited to startups unless the community has decided to support the initiative by donating the required amount of money.

And Kickstarter’s popularity has not waned. In fact, the platform has shown steady growth since its inception raising over 5.9 Billion USD since its creation.

However, there is a new kid on the block: DAOs, decentralized organizations of people who make decisions using blockchain technology without the need for intermediaries.

And as time goes on, more and more million-dollar DAOs are being created around various projects ranging from functional blockchain projects like the Ethereum Name Service to buying a copy of the U.S. Constitution.

So it’s no wonder Kickstarter wants to test the waters – and perhaps create a better way to support new ventures.