Provenance to restore consumer trust with the blockchainThe international trade in counterfeit goods is growing at an alarming rate. The International Chamber of Commerce estimates that the total value of counterfeit and pirated products could be as much as US$1.77 trillion in 2015.
With more counterfeit goods on the market, consumers have an even greater need to find trust suppliers, and quality information since there are many dangers in using counterfeit products.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) warns consumers against buying counterfeit goods which can cost them more than just financial loss. Using counterfeit goods can cause illness, disability or even death. For example, some fraudulent medicines have been found to contain highly toxic substances such as rat poison, according to the UNODC.
Food is another area where trust is paramount. Tainted milk formula containing melamine, a chemical normally used in plastics, made 300,000 Chinese babies ill in 2008, about 54,000 of which were hospitalized and six died. There have also been cases where rat poison and other dangerous chemicals have been found in food, where other more expensive and legitimate additives should have been.
No matter if we're just worried that some food item is fresh enough, or want to buy a genuine Gucci, or are trying to figure out if that wild Alaskan-caught salmon was really from Alaska, trust in a company and their brand is all we've really had before recent times to ensure that these products meet our standards.
Many major brands have put a lot of efforts into building trust by making the process of creating and shipping their product more transparent. Proving the value, freshness, and authenticity of everyday products using tracking software has been attempted before today, but the delivery of that data, or the trustworthiness of that delivery system, was simply not good enough. Consumers still have to rely on any of the data entered into the system, and it could have been edited after the fact too.
At least a dozen legacy software tracking systems exist out there that can follow an item from producer to the store, and tell us something about it online, but from a consumer's standpoint, why should we trust their data?
Producers create and control all of that information, not consumers, nor even government, so if there is some doubt about where the Gucci bag originated or how old the Salmon is, you'd be naïve not to ask why they couldn't simply misreport or outright falsify the numbers when it is to their advantage to do so.
Nowadays, however, we have Bitcoin. Whatever happens on the blockchain, stays on the blockchain, and everyone in the world can see it. What better place to record and share such important, ongoing information? Trust in a supply chain can finally be had, at least from the point where the information first gets added.
Provenance is the first enterprise to step up and create these transparent supply chains for all types of products. While a few specialized services like Everledger and Ascribe use the blockchain to track single product types, in their cases of diamonds and digital artwork respectively, Provenance was designed to track any type of product, throughout every part of its lifecycle.
All three use the immutability of the blockchain to record information about their products journey, but Provenance is the first to create a system where all of a product’s history can be traced from the producer to the consumer completely, giving updates along the way at each step - where it is, who has it, and for how long.
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