The Problem Of Counterfeit Drugs
The World Health Organization has estimated that the yearly global market for counterfeit drugs is nearly $200 billion. It is estimated that around 30% of the total drugs sold in developing markets are fake. These fake drugs range from aspirin to cancer-fighting medicines. Asia sees the most counterfeit drugs, where some estimates put counterfeit drugs at over 40%.
Counterfeit drugs contain a small amount, or none, of the active ingredients which they claim. They can contain a different medicine, no medicine, or even harmful toxins which make the drugs cheaper to produce.
Counterfeit drugs are intentionally produced to deceive doctors and patients into using the medicine. This is different from factory-deficient drugs where abnormalities are accidentally produced.
It is estimated that anywhere from 50,000 to over 1,000,000 million people die from fake drugs annually. Most cases are not reported to the authorities and many times, the patients and doctors have no idea that the drugs are fake. This means that potentially this number is much higher.
Blockchain provides a solution to this problem by offering an efficient, cheap and immutable supply chain system. This will allow medicines to be easily tracked from production to consumption and could make great strides to combat this global epidemic.
FarmaTrust’s Vision: A World Without Counterfeit Drugs
FarmaTrust believes that they can solve this problem. Their main goal is to provide a global tracking system for the pharmaceutical supply chain industry aimed specifically at blocking counterfeit drugs from entering the market.
FarmaTrust seeks to use blockchain and AI to not only eliminate counterfeit medicine and also to automate regulatory compliance, automatic payments and create automatic audits. They want to provide “just in time” delivery of drugs, thereby preventing price spikes in medicines.
With “just in time” delivery, they mean to ensure there is even distribution of medicine across the globe to the places where they are needed, when they are needed.
In addition, their system can prevent returns fraud and waste through expired drugs becoming unusable.
FarmaTrust integrates all lines of the supply chain: the manufacturer, warehouses, distributors, and logistical companies, all the way down to the doctors and patients who prescribe and consume the drugs. This streamlines the whole process, making things efficient and, more importantly, allowing the drugs to be cheaply and easily verified as legitimate.
With FarmaTrust, all of the steps in the creation and distribution of medicines will be tracked on the blockchain.
Blockchain is a perfect use case for pharmaceutical supply chain management because it is transparent, autonomous and impossible to alter. Another great thing is, once a medicine’s label has been successfully added to the blockchain, there are a number of additional things you can do with that data such as process automatic payments, audits and conduct regulatory reporting.
The Technology Behind the Platform
FarmaTrust is developing a web-based, peer-to-peer platform designed to keep an immutable record of every legitimate drug whose information is stored on the blockchain. The platform is designed to eliminate the influx in global counterfeit drugs through their unique labeling and supply chain management system.
Once launched, the FarmaTrust platform will allow users worldwide to leverage the power of blockchain and other technologies such as artificial intelligence to combat counterfeit medicine.
The key to removing counterfeit drugs from the market is by tracking the pharmaceuticals through the entire supply chain from manufacturer to consumption. It can be done with technologies which link physical products to the digital world, and this ensures that what reaches the patients are all authentic.
When you add a unique digital reference to a drug linked to a physical copy of the drug, it is very hard to erase or duplicate one without the other. This, therefore, makes precise and accurate tracking through the entire supply chain possible.
This process will be enabled through FarmaTrust’s “Zoi” platform. Zoi is an distributed and interoperable supply chain exchange, designed to achieve just that. FarmaTrust already has a working version of Zoi and a raw prototype of the mobile app which goes with it.
Zoi will be able to create a network of pharmaceuticals, manufacturers, suppliers, shipping, logistics companies, wholesalers, distributors, pharmacies and hospitals. The network will become a credible source of ensuring that all products on the supply chain are authentic.
The platform will provide pharmaceutical companies, their various distributors and the appropriate regulators with the visibility and information necessary to greatly reduce supply chain costs.
In addition, Zoi will be able to identify gaps across varying compliance regimes, assist in the recovery of any funds lost through counterfeiting, and protect customers and brands by greatly reducing or eliminating fraudulent medicine in the supply chain.
FarmaTrust has a packed but attainable 2018 roadmap. By the end of Q2, they will have the Zoi platform in Alpha testing and have their wallet and mobile app available for use.
By the end of the year, they plan to have the platform fully ready to be scaled and interoperated between various platforms. They also aim to ramp up their marketing business operations in the meantime to ensure that they not only have clients lined up but will be able to provide them support.
Most exciting is that by Q2 2019, they plan on having the production version of the Zoi platform available for commercial use. This means that eager contributors won’t have to wait very long to see their investments bear fruit as customers will be able to start to use the platform quickly.
The FarmaTrust Team
FarmaTrust has put together a strong team from both the world of blockchain and business. CEO Raja Sharif is the driving force behind FarmaTrust’s vision. Raja has successfully managed a number of tech and media projects worldwide such as British Telecom and Al Jazeera and will bring this experience to the FarmaTrust team.
Shahnawaz Aziz is FarmaTrust’s CTO and will be leading the technology development. He has over 21 years of IT experience, and has been involved with blockchain projects for a number of years.
FarmaTrust has recruited David Allen Cohen to the position of Chief Technology Advisor. He is a co-founder of IOTA an the founder and chairman of dcntral, a blockchain-based cybersecurity company. He is also an advisor for the data structure and consensus algorithm Hashgraph.
With this combination of experience, advisors and resources, FarmaTrust has set the groundwork to accomplish what they aim to do.
View the rest of the FarmaTrust team on their website.
The FTT Token: Token Use and Breakdown
FarmaTrust will be issuing two types of tokens: holder tokens and utility tokens. The holder tokens (FTT) will be based on the Ethereum ERC-20 standard. 600,000,000 of the total 1,000,000,000 fixed supply will be available for sale.
After the tokens have been distributed, holders of the FTT tokens will begin to generate utility tokens at a rate of 500 tokens per week. This generation rate will increase by 10% from the initial quarter, and will continue to do so for the next 6 and a half years.
A utility token is required each time you wish to track something through the life cycle of the blockchain. Each time a utility token is used, it will be “burned”, meaning that it cannot be used a second time.
Since there is a fixed supply of FTT-generating tokens, as demand for the utility token grows, so will the demand for the holder tokens because these are essential for the production of utility tokens themselves.
These utility tokens will be quite similar to how NEO tokens are used to produce NEO Gas, which is in turn used as the form of payment for using the network. This may be a great opportunity to get in on a similar token model while the project is in its infancy.
The FTT Token Sale
The FTT presale started on February 15, 2018 and is currently ongoing. During the presale, tokens will be sold at a 20% discount which will come to $0.08087 USD per FTT token. The presale will continue for a duration of 4 weeks or until 200,000,000 tokens are sold, whichever comes first.
The FTT main sale is set to launch on March 15, 2018. In the main sale, the tokens will be available at their full price of $0.101092 USD per token. The sale will last a total of 4 weeks, or until the remaining 333,333,333 tokens are sold.
Anyone wishing to participate in the ICO can do so by joining the FarmaTrust whitelist at https://www.farmatrust.io/. Prior to contribution, you will be asked to fill in the whitelist form, which includes your email, address, contribution address, and desired contribution amount.
The revenue generated from the token distribution event will be used as described in the project’s whitepaper.
Note: Residents of the USA and Singapore are not able to participate in this ICO.
Final Thoughts
David Cohen (co-founder of IOTA) stated in an interview that FarmaTrust is a perfect application for blockchain technology. Many blockchain startups today are attempting to fit blockchain into a business model which could do without it, which is not the case for FarmaTrust. This could be a huge advantage for them moving forward.
FarmaTrust has a lot to be excited about. They have a working prototype, which has been tested and proven to work. With the money raised in this token distribution event, they will be able to take their prototype and expand upon it in order to release a usable production version to the public.
In fact, FarmaTrust recently officially signed a partnership with the Mongolian government to prevent the creation and distribution of counterfeit drugs. This one-year pilot project will have FarmaTrust collaborating with Mongolian governmental and non-governmental parties, the Specialized Inspection Agency of Tuv Province of Mongolia & the Mongolian e-Government Center NGO. This partnership is a good sign of the viability of the project and shows the progress of the team in reaching their stated goals.
Find out more about FarmaTrust by visiting their website. There, you can participate in their FTT token sale and download the whitepaper. If you wish to interact with the community, join their Telegram channel.
