Maybe you’ve seen that beautiful handbag online, or in the window of a shop. You can picture how great you’ll look wearing it on a night out. What you may not realize is that roughly 10% of all luxury goods for sale are estimated to be counterfeits, and that alarming trend is on the rise.
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Can a digital blockchain protect real-life food, luxury items, and even medicine?
The other angle on authenticity
But recently, experts in retail — and across a variety of very physical, very analogue industries — have been turning to a technology associated with the digital realm: blockchain. Best known for its use in securing digital transactions, verifying non-fungible tokens (think of bored simian art), and tracing cryptocurrencies in a digital ledger, blockchain’s digital ledger technology is also being used to provide a window into the provenance, quality, and sustainability of everything from a beautifully, ludicrously capacious handbag, to the prescriptions in your medicine cabinet.
In fashion, retailers have banded together to create a blockchain network that assigns each of their high-end products something akin to a digital passport. When scanned, that passport registers information about an item — the purse you’ve been eyeing, perhaps — on the blockchain, providing a detailed log of its meticulous manufacturing process. By providing transparency into everything from where the bag’s leather was sourced, who stitched it together, and how it made its journey into a closet, blockchain can help ensure that your hard earned cash is in fact being put to high-end use.
In agriculture, blockchain’s digital ledger technology is also being used to trace a good’s supply chain journey, this time from farm to table. For coffee drinkers, this means providing a window into where their bean was grown, and insight into whether or not it was farmed in safe and sustainable conditions. For growers, this helps them prove the quality and origin of their beans, helping to ensure their safety and fair compensation.
In many cases, knowing a product’s origins can be a matter of life and death. This is particularly and frighteningly true in the developing world, where estimates show that one in 10 medical products in low-and middle-income countries are substandard or falsified. Increasingly, a collection of pharmaceutical companies are using blockchain’s digital ledger technology to trace the provenance and quality of their drugs’ ingredients and manufacturing conditions, ensuring a potentially life-saving medicine is what it claims to be.
Not only is blockchain helping to prove the legitimacy of goods for consumers, and providing transparency into working conditions for growers and makers, in the process it’s also securing industries worth billions of dollars for manufacturers and retailers. That’s some very real-world implications for a very digital technology.
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