Understanding Blockchain:
- Why blockchain came into the picture?
- How blockchain works.
How "Great" leveraged blockchain technology?
Summary: Fashion industry is the major market for the counterfeit products. Within the fashion industry, sneakers hold the 40% cap of the total counterfeits which sums to $240 billion.
Few eye opener statistics:
-
~ $600 billion worth of counterfeit products in the fashion industry.
-
40% of all counterfeit goods are sneakers. ~ $240 billion
-
~ $100 million worth of sneakers were seized by U.S. customs in last one year
Why is counterfeit a problem?
-
A company does R&D and spends a lot.
-
Product launches to market.
-
In few days counterfeit reaches.
-
Difficult to recover R&D cost.
To overcome these counterfeits, big companies followed some traditional approach like changing the manufacturing process and material science which added a lot of cost to the product. Few companies came up with authentication certificate for their products, but a piece of paper is easier to fake.
“Great” leveraged blockchain technology to win over counterfeits and used:
-
3-D printed smart tag with a unique identification code for each pair of sneakers.
-
Tags with NFC chips.
-
A mobile app to scan and verify authenticity(by blockchain)
Brendan Eich(JS creator and co-founder of Firefox) working on Blockchain:
Welcome to the ad-free world(Brave browser)