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Logistics and fine wine has been open to exploitation for some time. There are multiple examples of wine tampering, theft, counterfeiting and passing that all undermine confidence in both the supply and demand of fine wine as an asset class around the world, costing producers millions of dollars in lost revenue.   

A recent Forbes article (https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamelaambler/2017/07/27/china-is-facing-an-epidemic-of-counterfeit-and-contraband-wine/#53ae578e5843) described wine fraud as an ‘epidemic’, with claims that over 50% of all wine exceeding $35 per bottle sold in China as being counterfeit. An estimated 30,000 fake bottles of wine are sold each hour in China alone.

https://i.imgur.com/cjhsshg.png

A new initiative coming from NEM which is called "Symbol", helps wine growers and producers keep track of what’s happening with their raw materials and products at every stage of production and distribution, by using blockchain to track and verify the product as it leaves the vineyard, with all key information publicly available to reinforce the wine’s authenticity. If other industries such as food, agriculture, etc. started utilizing them this way, their token value will surely increase.

Will we see more of these scenarios in the next coming years?

Yes, probably. Scam and fraud can be found on ALL industries, and I remember seeing like a sneaker company (I forgot if it's Nike or something) that was planning to use blockchain to use as proof of authenticity for a specific shoe.

If Symbol becomes the universal platform that companies will use, the token price will surely grow and probably do better than NEMs.

Why won't people build it on the Ethereum blockchain anyways?

We definitely will, its not just NEM who's doing it, but even other companies are already using blockchain technology in their businesses. Its just a matter of introducing the tech side to them.

This idea of blockchain-secured logistics is rather stupid in my honest opinion.

There's no way to check for the falsification of data so long as it's not grammatically generated in a cryptographically verified way. Sensors, GPS coordinates etc. can all be tampered with.
The whole logistics management aspect that combines blockchain infrastructure into the picture is still very much trust based and doesn't have any of the advantages a blockchain could have for lets say financial transactions.

NEM is a good blockchain technology and works with many companies already so the wine company choses this technology over the other, ETH also need to explore the business world and keep introducing their platform if they really want to grown on this aspect.

With a help of blockchain, this can really help to eliminate fraud and irregularity on the company since everything can be seen on blockchain and no one can tampered it. This is a good move to a company who are suffering from this kind of problem, from the production up to the market introduction NEM is a big help.

How is it different from a centralized database that also stores and tracks ids of their products? A lot of companies that have to deal with scammers counterfeiting their product were using these methods even before blockchain was invented. And what would stop scammers from doing the oldest trick in the book - copying the identifier of a genuine item and slapping it on their fakes?

That's a good question.I guess that every "identifier" will have some unique code that can be verified by the blockchain.The code should be verified only once and duplicated use of such code means that the product is fake.That's just my assumption,I'm no expert.
In the land of counterfeit goods-China,with all the counterfeit clothes and electronics,which are exported around the world every day,there's also counterfeit wine.I'm not surprised. :(
I'm not an optimist about this blockchain technology being used to stop fraud.The fraudsters will always find away to outsmart the technology.

It is not only this wine company , there are many other companies using blockchain to eleminate the corruption , frauds and laundering of commodities. At the end of the day blockchain stores all the data which can be checked Time and again by anyone .

https://i.ibb.co/cJVnnQV/companies-using-blockchain-technology-1024x1024-1.png (https://ibb.co/K6SvvWS)

https://101blockchains.com/companies-using-blockchain-technology/ (https://101blockchains.com/companies-using-blockchain-technology/)

Walmart
Unilever
De beers
Ford
Anheuser Busch InBev 

These companies are already using blockchain in the supply market .

Not only that we also have the companies using blockchain in the healthcare sectors , insurance , energy , trade , travel , real estate ! Trust me the list goes on .

I would recommend you to look into the link and check out  they have listed 50 companies like FDA , using blockchain technology for everyday work .

It's not something that we will have to wait for the future , it is already happening :3

As a wine fan, I appreciated that approach. Now d'Yquem, Pétrus, and all others that play in the high price range should consider that as well. They are the ones affected most of fraud, just use a random red wine and put a famous label on it. A uneducated person won´t even taste or understand the difference. Mostly it´s 2000% more in price for 5% more taste.

It should be able to ensure you get an authentic product though, which is the point. Falsification of data somewhere along the way shouldn't be an issue, since all that matters is you know the same company actually made it.

That being said, the blockchain aspect is absolutely unnecessary for this. This seems to be just another case of a Blockchain Company trying to create a new market by throwing something to the wall and hoping it sticks.

Exactly what I was just thinking.
Perhaps make the verification/secret keys (which should be worth the price of each product) their products tokens so that customers can buy them first before they can verify the products with the keys, maybe combined with codes on the products.
The companies could even hide certain features on their products and put them in better smart-contracts for users to find and verify their products more properly.

Here you can check how Nike plans to do it https://cointelegraph.com/news/nike-patents-a-system-for-tokenizing-shoes-on-ethereums-blockchain (https://cointelegraph.com/news/nike-patents-a-system-for-tokenizing-shoes-on-ethereums-blockchain)!
Nothing is impossible, but it will be very hard for counterfeiters to do something here. Many companies used different methods, but now with blockchain companies have a better tool. I think this will work, but probably we will need to wait and see how good it will work, and what counterfeiters can do here. In theory this can be very good thing, but reality is something else, scammers are smarter too, this races last for years, and maybe blockchain technology can make some difference in favor of companies.

We will just like the application in Nike.

Nike Patents ‘CryptoKicks’ Blockchain Shoes (https://www.pymnts.com/innovation/2019/nike-patents-cryptokicks-blockchain-shoes/)

Nike Experiments With Blockchain Technology For Supply Chain Data Collection (https://businessblockchainhq.com/business-blockchain-news/nike-experiments-with-blockchain-technology-for-supply-chain-data-collection/)

Its only a matter of time before people come to the realization of the enormous potential of the ethereum blockchain. Maybe with the new upgrade coming , we will see massive shift

Similar to what the cannabis farm in Colombia is doing, this might spark some companies to better their game and to actually combat counterfeit items by keeping track of what they're selling. For all we know, millions are probably lost from these companies due to counterfeit goods, and by just adding one simple thing in their production and logistics they could save a lot of $$$ for themselves.

Most companies who are being targeted by counterfeit goods would likely try to see whether they can employ this step on their production line. While this may help reduce people being misdirected on buying counterfeit goods, some people would still choose OEM or counterfeit items rather than the original item itself since they believe that it's cheaper and more economical, although we know that that is not the case for the most part.

That's the point. Blockchain can offer nothing on this matter that cannot be solved by a centralized solution. Moreover, a centralized solution will always be more efficient, for it doesn't require to replicate the same data on thousands of nodes and run a BFT consensus procedure on every input. Besides, it can be much more flexible and customizable for any particular use case. All these companies are just hyping and that's the only reason for the usage of blockchain in such cases.

There is really no surprisingly big deal in this. Since time immemorial companies are known to use modern day technologies to improve their processes. This would ensure that they are in tune with current happenings and also a way to to reduce costs thereby increasing profit. Leveraging on technology such is actually a good one for the blockchain which further lend credence that there is more than the currency part of things among other usefulness...

But I guess a centralized database can be edited by an insider when it comes to blockchain it can't be which maybe the key difference why they are going to implement blockchain for tracking their products but I don't really think they can stop counterfeit bottle by using this kind of track because consumer maynot be validating the products which they bought from a store with the publicly available ledger.

Inside jobs are probably barely a problem in this scenario, plus blockchain might not be immune from it if it's made to be editable, like it often happens with all these corporate blockchains.

The biggest problem is that this setup if full of centralized intermediaries - various validators, verified vendors, shipping companies and so on. In the end of the day, you trust that none of these entities have swapped the legit items with fake ones, or that they haven't tampered with in some other way. This is exactly what we have now with the centralized approach.

If the company is maintaining all the nodes in a closed space then there is no point of doing this, but I feel they are trying to do implement blockchain technology which maybe a good news to take from this.They have to analyse the possibility of reducing the centralize things if they really want to take those fake products.

It will definitely succeed with a good system as long as people are aware of method for detecting and countering the counterfeits
Well decentralized system would be an awesome way to make this hard to counterfeit as far as I can tell. A centralized system will have to worry about insiders, hackers or even owners defeating the anti-counterfeit system.

So how is it going to help eliminate fraud and secure authenticity? I mean, yeah they are using blockchain technology, but it does not explain what steps they will be taking.
Will they be storing "some" information in the blockchain that will help to verify the authenticity?
If that is the case, can't they do the same thing using regular databases? I mean what would be the difference? Central databases are still used to carry out these verification, but they all still have flaws. Do you think they were able to address the flaws and fix it?

2 3 years ago their was an ico project called Ambrosus that also aimed at making food supply chain authentic so that everyone can track and verify the source of the food material and where it is coming from and what is it composed of but the project seems to be slow on the development side as i have not seen their functional business yet other than a few partnerships, I hope they will become proactive because it is a good niche and they can generate serious business with it.

I will need more information on this, is the project completed or still ongoing? how will this eliminate Scammers? In what way actually? This are other things that needs to be transparent to investors, I hope this works out because using blockchain to track fake wine sounds impossible to me

This is a good move that the company is taking. There are lots of counterfeits out there, if only people can be able to identify these counterfeits and avoid them, it would be really good. Although I still don’t think that this is going to stop the selling of counterfeits in the market, but it can help those who are interested to be able to identify whether a product is fake or not. Furthermore, we have to know that it’s not everyone that makes use of technology, so those people who are technologically inclined will be the ones that are patronising those fake wine sellers. But overall, this is a good action that has been taken here.


Yes, getting more information on this definitely helpful as we may plan up for investing when this project will be checking all the boxes. I guess their dev team must find time to explain all our doubts and questions so that it will end up in favor of them by attracting more investors to their project. Being transparent will always help for sure.


They must be having some unique idea to handle this situation. In my understanding also, blockchain is a new innovative idea to keep database in more secured way for preventing counterfeiting and all other manipulation and malpractices. So, tracking fake thing could be an additional thing which could accomplished through some other thing like through API kind of development.