Brand Protection and Product Authentication Services Platform - SEAL NETWORK

How do you currently verify the authenticity of the products you purchase in today's world? Personally, I really do not bother much as it's quite difficult to differentiate between an original and counterfeit product.

According to research, the total number of global counterfeiting arrived at approximately $1.2 trillion in 2017 and might reach $1.82 trillion by 2020.

In spite of the exertions and collaborations by the governments, the private sector, NGOs and other international regulatory bodies, counterfeiting and piracy keep soaring at an astonishing rate. For example, the losses incurred as a result of online counterfeiting globally totalled $323 billion by the 2017 year end. This amount is higher than the national GDP of some countries in the world.

In comparing counterfeiting with other illicit activities such as cocaine sales, human trafficking, and illegal gambling, it's quite interesting to know that counterfeit market by far surpasses these other activities in terms of market capitalization. This is to just to show the magnitude of how counterfeiting has greatly eaten deep into the global market, and its economic impact cannot be overemphasized.

To further understand the counterfeit market, it can be broken down into two sub-markets. The very first being the primary market, where consumers buy pirated products thinking they actually bought the authentic products, and the second being the secondary market, comprises of consumers who look for products they think to be a cheap buy deliberately purchase counterfeit products. These products pose great health hazards because they are often sub-standard, and the type of products being encroached have increased in recent years. Examples include watches, footwear, clothes, medical equipment, pharmaceutical products, foods, drinks, personal care items, toys etc. Several factors such as the advent of e-commerce platforms, the ballooning in global trade, communication and technology, have contributed to the booming counterfeit market. They have indirectly provided unprecedented openings for structured crimes to partake in the illegal trade.

It has, however, become necessary that these illicit activities need to be stopped or at least curbed to the barest minimum. Several solutions such as watermarks, holograms etc., which currently exists still haven't addressed the issues holistically. There is truly a need for a platform that will not only address the current issues but also seek out to protect the consumers and business organizations who spend huge sums of money and resources to protect their brands.

In providing this ecosystem, Seal Network went all out making various research in understanding the current problems which exist and how best to approach it. It was discovered that static solutions such as QR-codes, holograms and RFID can be easily compromised, products easily copied and consumers experience difficulties in verifying the authenticity of a product. Based on these, Seal Network adopted a different approach by leveraging on blockchains to tackle these issues in 3 steps.

• Utilization of blockchain technology to build the Seal Network in addition to embedded dynamic NFC chips. Blockchain helps to stop all form of data duplication due to its immutable functionality. The NFC chips add its sauce to the Seal platform by making sure that a product's chip cannot meddle, thereby providing maximum security as the chip product changes anytime there's an interaction with it or attempt to verify it. The NFC chip is unique because it contains a 7-byte UID, tap count that increases whenever a chip is scanned, and a private key. It takes the combination of the tap count, desired function and private key before a message can be signed.

• Easy authenticity verification of products which enables consumers to easily verify the originality of products before purchase.

• Removal of financial incentive by embedding chips which would be authenticated on the blockchain, thus making it unable to copy chips of products.

Other key distinctive features of the Seal platform include:

• Incentivize adoption - This enables a brand to make a profit whenever an ownership is transferred and the brand counter-balances the cost of the chip.

• Registration and transfer of ownership - It allows a consumer to claim and transfer ownership of a product.

• Theft prevention - This ensures the protection of consumers through the theft-prevention services. To simply explains this, this service enables one to register ownership of a product on the seal network blockchain. However, if for any reason, the product gets stolen or missing, the owner has the capacity to flag that product as either lost or stolen through the Seal App, and also add a custom message which would be displayed whenever that particular product is scanned. In the case where the product was stolen, no one would be able to purchase it because the owner would have flagged it alongside the custom message which would be displayed to the buyer. Once that particular product is scanned, a timestamp and geolocation data of the product will be generated which would help in trailing and recouping the product.

• Ability to track parallel trade - Brands do not have total visibility of how their products are being distributed or imported across regions or countries. However, with the use of the seal network, brands will have the capacity to assign each product to a specific country. This would enable brands have an oversight of each individual product by knowing the distributor that purchased the particular product, and in the case where a product is scanned in a market not duly assigned by the brand, the brand will be notified of the distributor that carried out the parallel trade. This feature will help brands handle issues associated with parallel trading.

• Product Recalls - This feature enables brands to easily recall product which they feel might imperil the consumer due to product defects or safety reasons. For every product recall made by the brand, the owners of that particular product will receive a push notification and email. Using a faulty product as an example, if such product is scanned, the concerned end-users will receive a caution message from the brand to return the product securely.

• Product Analytics - This equips brands with geospatial and time series analytics in order to make them have a grasp of their collectibility index, track product streams, detect ambassador hubs for marketing purposes, theft areas identification, estimate retention and brand engagement, identify growth and decline areas e.t.c. This analytics will enable brands to better understand customer experience/response to usage of products and also post sales products movements.

• Custom Integration - This will enable brands to use separate customized APIs that would redirect consumers to a customs source.

• The Seal App- In its bid to make the seal network more user-friendly and easily accessible, the seal app was designed. The app is compatible with Android and iOS and will be available on these play stores later in the year. The app boasts of features such as authenticity checks, ownership transfers and inventory management.

• Decentralized Apps for Brands- Brands who aim to utilize the Seal platform will have the opportunity to have their own decentralized apps built by Seal for their product.

The Seal Network has been mapped out in three different phases;

Phase 1- the infrastructure of Authenticity
Phase 2- Convergence of E-commerce & Retail
Phase 3- Currency of Authentication - This would make Seal the most effective currency for the exchange of consumer product as well as a guaranteed exchange of goods.

REVENUE STREAMS

Brands who intends to utilize the Seal network will pay 25% fee on all service fees. However, the service fees are controlled by the brands, and for every 25% fee paid by brands, Seal burns 5% of it. Other means such as chip sales, SaaS products, consulting & integration will be offered to brands

TEAM

The Seal team consist of passionate individuals with rich and diverse experience across several sectors such as international business development, blockchain technology, systems security, marketing, advertising and sales.

The Seal token (SEAL) will be issued in the form of an ERC-20. It will function as a multi-utility token which will be used to fuel the Seal network. The maximum number of tokens which will be minted is 1,200,000,000 (1.2billion)

Token symbol: SEAL
Soft cap: 3,000,000 SEAL
Hard cap: 33,000,000 USD
Current Price: 1 SEAL= 0.08 USD
Country: Netherlands

41% of the total tokens will be allocated for token sale. However, 13% of the total tokens will be allocated to team and advisors, 7% for influencers, 22% for future operations, and 17% for research.

Kindly visit https://seal.network/ for more information.
Whitepaper: https://seal.network/seal-whitepaper.pdf
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