Ukrainian developers have come up with their own anti-counterfeiting solution, based on the uniqueness of glass cracks combined with the blockchain technology. Taras Rodtsevych, the founder and CEO of the UATAG, told about the technology and how it works. In November UATAG team represent the product on the Brand Protection Congress in Germany:
About the invention and its target audience
Today, the world market is full of fakes. The system is so coherent that it is almost impossible to do nothing about it. According to the International Chamber of Commerce, global economic value of counterfeit and pirated goods worth as much as $653.77 Billion in 2016 and accounts for up to 7% of the global world trade annually. The report estimates that these costs could reach $4.2 trillion by 2022.
Often, fakes can endanger life and health - I am talking about counterfeiters who produce fake medications, alcohol, tobacco, auto parts or toys — buying such items clearly poses a health risk.
My colleagues and I began to analyze the existing protective technologies and to think over the one that would protect both: the brand and the consumer from the purchase of low-quality goods. In fact, there is a large number of such methods - holograms, QR codes, bar codes, watermarks, but none of them is perfect because it can be reproduced by falsifiers with one or another probability.
In the end, we invented, and later patented a solution that helps to identify whether the product is original with the 100% accuracy. It's something like a fingerprint. The solution for product originality verification and counterfeit protection is based on a two-level authentication technology: physical — the uniqueness of the broken glass cracks, that play the role of product fingerprint, and digital — blockchain technology.
Due to the unique physical properties of glass, the position, shape, and size of the glass cracks are completely unpredictable and non-reproducible. It is impossible to make two identical crack patterns. Glass always has internal tensions occurring in the process of glass production. When a plate of glass is mechanically damaged, the cracks that form in it will follow the vectors of the compression and stretching tensions. This allows to create a unique crack pattern, that can not be replicated. Never!
The authentic origin of the product is verified by visually comparing the unique crack pattern of the product identifier with its electronic representation obtained from the database on the screen of customer's smartphone.
Customer scans UATAG’s QR code that is attached to the product and sees the image of this particular tag from the secure database. Compares electronic reproduction of the glass pattern with the one that is attached to the product, if they match — the product is original!
Read more about UATAG technology, about the benefits of using blockchain, UATAG team and project development plans on the:
