Seal is a project that aims to solve unsolvable till now problem of product authentication. After it will be launched, anyone from consumer to manufacturer, will get the ability to confidently, quickly and economically verify the authenticity of any product which is Seal enabled. Mission of the project – as it announced – is “to create a more genuine world, out of love for creation”.
Technical options
The Seal proprietary technology utilizes NFC compatible Seal chips which can be effectively, securely and discretely incorporated with any physically manufactured product. Upon integration of the Seal chip, the product is paired with the digital counterpart on the blockchain. Verification of authenticity is instantaneous with a simple tap or scan with any smart device.
Four main components are integrated into the Seal platform: (i) products with an embedded Seal-chip that uniquely identify physical products (ii) the Seal-app installed on an NFC-compatible smartphone, (iii) the Seal-token which allows communication between the different parts of the platform and (iv) the Seal-network, an immutable blockchain database where each transaction is recorded and validated by its nodes.
Brands are the sole issuer of product-pairings on the blockchain. This way, brands can ensure exactly how many authentic copies are released. Disingenuous manufacturers are no longer able to produce imitations that can be passed off as authentic, because they cannot replicate the token.
Seal’s technology is based on state-of-the-art NFC chips combined with blockchain technology. Seal offers consumers and brands the possibility to verify and guarantee the authenticity of valuable goods. Seal’s dynamic NFC chip generate unique codes every time it’s scanned. The combination of this dynamic chips and Ethereum’s smart-contract creates a watertight solution against counterfeiting.
Economical base
The demand for reliable tool that will separate original branded products from their “clones” (counterfeit) lasts for years. It seems that only blockchain platform can provide such an instrument for sure. And those manufactures which had losses due to counterfeit for decades – may have a hope to stop these losses due to Seal.
There are four components of counterfeit – as Seal mentions: (i) Primary Market Counterfeiting; (ii) Secondary Market Counterfeiting; (iii) Secondhand Market and (iv) Midnight Shift (Midnight shifting occurs when legitimate manufacturing partners of the brand produce a licensed product run during the day, but also create an unlicensed product run during the night).
Counterfeits reach the EU & US by the hundreds of millions of units. Unlicensed products are produced during midnight shifts and sold through parallel import. 85% of global counterfeiting originates from Asia. 20% of China’s total production is counterfeit goods. Global counterfeit products are projected to rise to $1954 billion by 2022 – as it is mentioned in the Seal Whitepaper. OECD states counterfeiting has scourging impact on economies. The profits end up funding cartels and terrorist cells. It is a bigger revenue stream for crime rings than the drug trade. Safety of people globally is jeopardized by fake medicine, airbags and airplane parts. And it is almost impossible for people to differentiate genuine from counterfeit products. Especially on the secondary market where fraudsters run amok, and there is no trust in the counterparty.
Both from the point of view – technical and economical – it is right time for the Seal project:
- Unprecedented growth, sophistication and scale of counterfeiting
- Cost of embedded-NFC chips has decreased
- NFC just recently opened up for iOS-developers
- Token Sale demand is at an all-time high (this will not last forever)
- Brands need to fight back, but don’t have the tools.
Marketing: Even more than anti-counterfeiting
Seal is more than an anti-counterfeiting platform. With Seal, some services can be used with each unique product on the Seal Network. A possible list of services includes:
- Verify Authenticity (Already implemented) Consumers check the authenticity of a product.
- Register ownership (Already implemented) Consumers claim ownership of a product. For insurance, P2P transactions & theft prevention.
- Transfer ownership (Already implemented) Consumers transfer ownership of a product. This allows brands to earn money on the secondary market
- Theft-Prevention: Consumers mark products as lost or stolen. Displays a custom message triggered when scanned.
- Track Parallel: Trade Brands track the origin of products and see where they are being sold.
- Product Recalls: Brands issue a product recall / product replacement by informing customers when they scan the faulty product.
- Product Analytics: Seal provides geospatial/time series product analytics to brands.
- Custom Integration: Brands use tokens to pay for API calls that redirect to a custom source such as an app or browser.
Business-model
For brands: Brands earn fees every time a new transaction is stored on the blockchain for one of their products. This is how brands not only justify the cost for outfitting their products with Seal-chips, it provides them a completely new profit stream from transactions made on the secondary market. Due to technical realizations of the Seal brands will be enabled to collect revenue from secondhand trade.
For Seal: Service Fees = Brands pay 25% fee to the Seal Network on all service fees upon usage of the platform. Seal Network burns 5% of the fees it receives from brands. Service fees are determined by brands and do not include mining fees.
Product Payments = If Seal is used in the future to pay for products, ownership transfer is automatically included in the transaction.
Chip sales = Seal will sell NFC chips to brands. Seal aspires to develop its own proprietary NFC chips in the future.
SAAS (Software as a Service) products = Additional SAAS products, such as analytics tools and custom integrations, will be sold as subscriptions separately.
Consulting & Integration = Seal offers integration consulting and onboarding services to new brands adopting Seal as well as support and training for the API.
Tokenomiks
Token sale: 13 May – 27 May 2018
Ticker: SEAL
Soft cap 33,000,000 tokens
Hard cap 492,000,000 tokens
Presale 384,000,000 tokens
Mainsale 108,000,000 tokens
Crowdsale price: 1 ETH = 7000 SEAL tokens
Platform: Ethereum
Accepted currency: ETH
Total Tokens: 1,200,000,000
Available for Token Sale: 41%
Country: Netherlands
Whitelist/KYC: KYC
Restricted areas: USA and China
Roadmap
Team
Bart Verschoor – founder, expert dealmaker with vast international business development experience at Dell, Bloomsix and Deloitte. Interested in IoT, robotics, blockchain and the FiWare consortium. Almost a member of Mensa and holds a master in Marketing Intelligence from the University of Groningen graduating on the topic of conjoint recommender systems in addition to completing the honours leadership track.
Joris Verschoor – founder, a technology leader and visionary with deep technical abilities. He was a child prodigy who began writing code at six and was active in the demo scene in the 1990s, and he has spent the last twenty years building diverse solutions and product strategies for various employers, consulting clients, and his own entrepreneurial ventures. Joris is a respected advisor to corporate leaders and a technical leader who also contributes to technology community mentorship programs and conferences, having won several awards and recognitions for his work.
Advisors
Max Blom Sr – Sr. Negotiation / Brands, Founder, Chairman & Honorary member of react.org
Cees Geel, Strategy Advisor High-Tech Ventures, Former Vice President and Managing Director NXP Software, Former CEO Philips Software
Petri Kuivala- Strategy / Security / Semiconductors, Chief Information Security Officer NXP Semiconductors, ex-CSO Microsoft , ex-CSO Nokia/
And three more names.
Conclusions
The project seems to be appeared in time. The demand for tools to combat counterfeiting is obvious. Technical implementation inspires confidence. Roadmap realistic. European team (Holland), authoritative advisors. Good marketing: the possible growth of the value of the token is justified due to the expansion of the scope of the platform and the accumulation of brand manufacturers in the blockchain. Chipping with NFC is, of course, not an innovation. But this also speaks in favor of the successful implementation of the project – NFC chips are constantly becoming cheaper and will not cause a rise in price of chipped products. The business model of the project promises its profitability soon after launch. And not only to the authors of the project, but also to the brands that become partners. As it is announced in Whitepaper, Seal is creating a network of brands and their communities, to not only protect authenticity, but also to redefine the rules of customer engagement. A primary function of the Seal Network is creating decentralised brand apps. Brands and consumers can connect and interact in innovative and more open ways. This enables brands to reproduce the route of sold items during the product life cycle. It also creates an infrastructure that allows for the optimisation of loyalty programs and personalisation of goods.
