How Technology Will Solve the $1.2 Trillion Problem of Counterfeit Goods
Today, criminal counterfeiting is on the upward swing. The booming trade of fake products has crossed the $1.2T/year mark worldwide and is poised to reach $1.8T by 2020, according to the Global Brand Counterfeiting Report.
The scourge of counterfeiting has spread to multiple industries across many sectors, both online and offline. From the luxury brands to the clothing, textile and footwear categories, fake goods have flooded the retail market and have massively impacted the healthcare scene, with the production and trade of counterfeit medical products becoming a problem of enormous scale. In fact, counterfeiting accounts for between 2.5 and 5 percent of global imports, and, in turn, up to 11 percent of medicines are substandard or falsified.
According to OECD Deputy Secretary-General Doug Frantz, the fake goods economy takes advantage of our trust in brands, trademarks, and intellectual property regulations “to undermine economies and endanger lives.”
Given the global scale of things, manufacturers and retailers plow billions of dollars into the anti-counterfeit sector to protect their brands against trademark infringement and prevent potential harm to consumers. Global market intelligence firms, such as Stratistics MRC and Grand View Research, expect the anti-counterfeit packaging market to cross the $215B mark by 2022, and list track-and-trace technology products as key to its growth.
Track-and-trace technologies
Gartner defines track-and-trace as a process of associating items or properties with unique identifiers, real-time verification, capturing events and other relevant information across the supply chain, and reporting on it. Shippers, such as postal and courier services, manufacturers and retailers adopt track-and-trace technologies to identify products, track their status information (location, temperature, etc.) and perform quality control checks.
Barcodes and radio-frequency identification (RFID) are two standard methods used to implement traceability at the level of the entire supply chain. While the former is cost-effective and applies to both the item and case-level use, the latter enables non-line-of-sight tracking, improves visibility and reduces errors. However, both methods have their limitations and require considerable technical expertise to verify consistency and completeness of status reports. As customer-friendly solutions become increasingly necessary in the sector, this factor can be crucial in the counterfeit prevention process.
Blockchain-based tracking
We at OIN SPACE are excited to announce the initiative to establish a pioneering consumer-focused trust ecosystem for brands, manufacturers, retailers and their shoppers. Powered by the blockchain, the OIN platform will introduce a new class of anti-counterfeit solutions able to confirm the authenticity of any purchase at every touchpoint of the shopping journey.
To date, we have developed a roadmap and confirmed interest among several large-scale companies. Seeking to raise up to $30M to develop a decentralized counterfeit protection system, we will conduct our token sale event, commencing commencing in mid-June, 2018. The sale of OIN tokens will give early contributors a massive bonus — feel free to join the White List.
Please, use the following links to get official updates:
- OIN SPACE PRE-SALE — starting in mid-June, 2018
- OIN SPACE Documentation — Whitepaper and One-pager
- OIN SPACE Social — Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram
