| Journal of Cybersecurity and Intelligent Systems
Received: 27 June 2026; Revised: 12 September 2026; Accepted: 17 September 2026; Published Online: 18 September 2026
J. Cybersecur. Intell. Syst., 2026, 1(1), 26502 | Volume 1 Issue 1 (September 2026) | DOI: https://doi.org/10.64189/cis.26502
© The Author(s) 2026
This article is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC 4.0)
Scalable Zero-Trust Supply Chain Management with
Soul-Bound Tokens and Merkle Tree Batching
Humayun Majid Khan,
1,*
Samana Jafri,
1
Ansari Zoha Najmul Kalam,
1
Ansari Adnan Mohd Irfan
1
and Ashmaan
Balan Shaikh
2
1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering (Internet of Things and Cyber Security including Blockchain Technology), M.H.
Saboo Siddik College of Engineering, Byculla, Mumbai, Maharashtra, 400008, India
2
South East Technological University, Carlow, Carlow, Leinster, R93 V960, Ireland
*Email : humayunk.pvt@gmail.com (Humayun Majid Khan)
Abstract
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Keywords:
1. Introduction
The global pharmaceutical supply chain is a very fragmented and convoluted system that was historically
marred with opaque networks, a lack of transparency and information silos and serious security patches.
This disintegration has resulted in an enormous black market of premium fake and poor-quality medicine. It is
estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO) that as much as 10% of medical products in less developed
countries are being falsified, which directly poses a threat to the lives of patients and yearly economic losses of
billions of dollars.
Classical centralized database schemes have become ineffective in the battle against this
epidemic because they are dependent on the services of trusted third parties and are vulnerable to single points
of failure, data corruption, and delays in synchronization.
Researchers and industries have resorted more to
decentralized ledger infrastructures as the way forward in countering these vulnerabilities. The immutable
nature of blockchain technology together with its cryptographic transparency and data integrity, which should
be ensured through consensus, provides a transformative architecture of supply chain provenance.
The self-
executable smart contract approach facilitates a fully automated, sequential process of physical objects,
including raw material mining and retail delivery, and creates an irrevocable audit trail.
Although these
theories have these benefits, practical applications of permissioned and public blockchain supply chains face
two serious technical constraints: identity spoofing and prohibitory storage capacity.
A substantial body of research suggests that tracking systems based on Ethereum or Hyperledger are suggested
as a way to prevent counterfeit medications.
Nevertheless, these frameworks that exist currently would
typically line up the roles of participants in a strictly linear fashion to cryptographic addresses that are public.
This general mapping exposes the network to very high susceptibility to a Sybil attack as well as secondary
market trading where a hacked node wallet or a node wallet sold to a malicious party can enable fraudulent
supply chain activities of a legitimate manufacturer.
Moreover, the tracking of high-volume, low-cost assets
(such as individual pill blister packs) in traditional on-chain transaction logs imposes prohibitive costs on
transactions in the form of gas (or transaction) and rapidly expands the state footprint of the blockchain, making
mass-production tracking neither economically relaxed nor feasible.
An essential research gap remains in
the determination of a supply chain framework, which can strengthen participant authorization and
nontransferable identity credentials and nontransferable physical identification in addition to O(1) storage
scalability in the verification of individual products.
Purpose of the research: The main goal of the research is to devise and introduce a scalable pharmaceutical
supply chain administration framework that uses nontransferable credentials for role-based authorization and
addresses the identified identity and storage challenges. This research explores the use of ERC-721-based
soulbound tokens (SBTs) as nontransferable participant credentials for strengthening role-based authorization
and reducing the risk of unauthorized identity use. Therefore, we attempt to address the mass-production
storage barrier through the architecture of a vBulk Minting mechanism based on off-chain Merkle trees. This
will reduce thousands of drug identifiers of each drug to one on-chain root and deploy a decentralized Merkle
proof verification mechanism to perform end-user verification on-the-fly.
2. Method / experimental details
The suggested architecture was engineered as a decentralized web application (DApp) that included an
immutable blockchain backend and a very responsive and user-friendly frontend display. Its methodology
emphasizes credential-based participant authorization and scalable traceability in batch processing.
2.1. Software and tools
To guarantee strong reproducibility, the following technology stack was used in the experimental setup:
i) Smart Contract Layer: Solidity (v0.8.19) compiled and tested in the Hardhat development environment. The
implementation uses OpenZeppelin Contracts v4.9.6 for the ERC-721 and Merkle-proof-related functionality.
ii) Local Blockchain Network: Hardhat local Ethereum network running a JSON-RPC endpoint at
http://127.0.0.1:8545 with chain ID 1337. The local network was used to deploy and test the smart contracts
under controlled conditions.
iii) Frontend Client Integration: Next.js 14 (App Router) was used along with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS with
Framer animations.
iv) Web3 Connectivity: Web3.js allows direct connections with two-way communication to the client interface
and Metamask wallet (signed transaction) in the browser.
2.2. System architecture and flow
The supply chain goes through state-dependent stages with strict enforcement through the primary contract
called SupplyChain.sol. The flow, as illustrated in Fig. 1, is realized in sequence of the following steps:
i) Contract Initialization: The address where the deployment is supposed to occur is the address that is assigned
the status of Owner. The owner creates an affiliated contract, CertificateSBT.sol, and initiates the main tracking
contract. The owner acts as the trusted administrative authority for participant onboarding and role
assignment. The blockchain provides decentralized transaction execution and tamper-evident state storage, but
the current prototype does not eliminate this administrative trust dependency
ii) Credential-based Identity Registration: The system uses soulbound tokens (SBTs) as non-transferable role
credentials to strengthen participant authorization and reduce the risk of unauthorized role impersonation. The
SBT mechanism does not by itself eliminate Sybil attacks or compromise participant wallets.
iii) Traceability Stages: A medicine goes through 6 consecutive states: Init - RawMaterialSupply - Manufacture -
Distribution - Retail - Sold. The functions to develop these states involve the participant being assigned the
specific role mapping that relates to the stage.
2.3. Working principle and network configuration
2.3.1. The blockchain back end (smart contract layer)
The framework uses a smart-contract-based supply chain controller deployed on a local Hardhat EVM test
network. While transaction execution and state verification are performed on the blockchain, participant
onboarding and credential issuance remain under the control of the designated owner.
Fig. 1:
The contract has been written in Solidity v0.8.19 and includes general mapping structures to index physical
pharmaceutical items worldwide. For example:
mapping (uint256 => medicine) public MedicineStock;
Contract operations are no longer provided by a regular usage of HTTP requests, as in some common web-based
systems. Rather, every state transition is triggered through signed blockchain transactions with signed and
verified participant wallets, which implies non-repudiation and resistance to tampering. To reduce Sybil
vulnerabilities, in which bad actors form several fake identities, the framework implements an auxiliary smart
contract, CertificateSBT.sol. This contract extends the OpenZeppelin ERC-721 implementation and overrides the
_beforeTokenTransfer hook to restrict transfers. Minting and burning are permitted, while transfers between
non-zero addresses are rejected. Under OpenZeppelin Contracts v4.9.6, _beforeTokenTransfer(address from,
address to, uint256 firstTokenId, uint256 batchSize) enforces the Soulbound restriction by requiring from ==
address(0) or to == address(0). The non-transferability constraint is formalized by equation (1), and it
implements the behavior of soulbound token (SBT):
(1)
Here, from denotes the previous token owner and to denotes the recipient address. Minting is represented by
from = address (0), while burning is represented by to = address (0). On the basis of this reasoning, we can only
have the following:
Stamped (at the zero address) or
Burned (to the zero address)
This means that every identity credential will be permanently fixed to the known node wallet. This non-
transferability provides a wallet-bound authorization mechanism within the tested prototype, while broader
regulatory compliance and protection against credential or key compromise require additional governance and
identity-assurance controls. The security model assumes that the owner is a trusted onboarding authority
responsible for verifying participant identities and issuing role-specific credentials. The SBT prevents credential
transfer between wallet addresses, but it does not prevent private-key compromise, key sharing, fraudulent
credential issuance, or misuse of a compromised authorized wallet. Credential revocation, replacement after
wallet compromise, and governance procedures for a compromised owner are therefore deployment
requirements beyond the current prototype.
2.3.2 Frontend application (client layer)
The client app is built using Next.js 14, which is based on TypeScript and Tailwind CSS to ensure efficient user
interaction. Web3.js is adopted as the main channel of communication between the client-side browser and the
EVM. Next, the js will provide a prompt to the browser-injected MetaMask provider when a participant activates
something (e.g., moving a medicine to the Manufacture stage). The transaction payload is cryptographically
signed with the participant using their personal key and broadcast to the EVM consensus layer such that the
Next.js server will never have any data about important key contents.
2.4 Data acquisition and state transformation
The data provided by a supply chain participant are verified by role-based verification first when they present
input data to the system. The physical lifecycle of a medicine is followed by six consecutive states, namely, Init
(Ordered), RawMaterialSupply, Manufacture, Distribution, Retail, and Sold. In carrying out a state change, the
smart contract authenticates the address of the $msg.sender of the address to the internationally registered SBT
index. As an example, calling the $Manufacturing(_medicineID): functionality places the burden on the contract
to decode the manCtr (Manufacturer Counter) mapping to identify the calling unique identity of the counter. It
is only when the cryptographic validation is successful that the ledger writes the new state of the item.
2.5 Off-chain cryptographic compression (vbulk minting)
Paralyzing computational costs would be triggered by the inherent limits of the block size and gas limits of
Ethereum-based networks by mapping thousands of individual blister packs on-chain natively.
Consequently,
the adoption of the vBulk Minting algorithm is presented.
The stage-by-stage implementation of this
mechanism is shown in Fig. 2, which implies the use of local off-chain hashing arrays that are then sent to
network finality after compression. Rather than sending 10,000 strings to the ledger, the Next.js client is able to
receive the input set. The front end applies the Keccak-256 hash function to each product identifier to generate
the 256-bit leaf nodes.
After the leaf nodes are acquired, the Merkletreejs library builds a binary tree. Nodes are concatenated and
hashed such that the neighboring node until only one 32-byte root string, the Merkle root, appears
change
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Fig. 2:
3. Results & discussion
The goal of the proposed framework was to avoid interaction between the unauthorized participants. At the
stage of the experiment, a decentralized node tried to implement the RMSupply() and Manufacturing () changes
of state but did not have the non-transferable CertificateSBT.sol asset at the first instance. As shown in Fig. 3,
the unauthorized transaction was rejected by the system.
Fig. 3:
3.2 vBulk minting: O(1) scalability and gas consumption analysis
A system that had been stressed tested the financial and computational efficiency of the off-chain Merkle tree
operation and compared traditional sequential on-chain storage to the proposed vBulk algorithmic
compression. In the supply chain in a classic blockchain supply chain, an individual pharmaceutical item is
registered into a single transaction payload containing metadata (e.g., ID, name, timestamp). The average EVM
gas consumption of a simple state change is approximately 21,000 to 45,000 gas units per item.
The given prototype created a batch of 10,000 separate pharmaceutical leaf nodes off-chain through the
Next.js and Merkletreejs libraries. The client generated the 32-byte Merkle root rather than performing 10,000
separate state changes on the smart contract.
As shown in Fig. 4, the resulting Merkle root was successfully
submitted as a single on-chain transaction.
Fig. 4:
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