Modex continues to bring you relevant use cases where blockchain has the power to improve several industries. After seeing how blockchain can reshape the KYC (Know Your Customer) process, as well as land registry and property rent, we’re speaking now about stamping out counterfeit goods with the help of blockchain and IoT.
Counterfeiting affects every stage of the product life cycle. Limited visibility across sourcing, manufacturing, and distribution networks makes it hard for manufacturers, partners, and customers to distinguish real goods from fake ones, leading to increased costs, stolen sales, reputational harm, and brand dilution.
Procurement and Production – Large manufacturers often lack the visibility needed to verify the authenticity of parts and raw materials and trace materials back to their source, a problem exacerbated by long, complex global supply chains, varying data and reporting quality across the vendor base, and a growing list of regulatory and compliance requirements.
Sales – Cleverly manipulated labels and reverse-engineered products can make it difficult for consumers and corporations to spot counterfeit goods and for manufacturers to prove their provenance. In consumer goods, the problem is even more challenging because of the rapid growth of 3rd party and online retail channels.
After-sales and Support – Counterfeits can lead to spikes in service requests, unnecessary and costly replacements, and skewed customer satisfaction figures. Invalid support requests not only consume time and budget, but they also make it hard for a company to isolate and address genuine problems in a timely fashion.
Solution: Blockchain and IoT
IoT provides unique identification and traceability, and blockchain provides a tamper-proof chain of custody information. Pairing them can create a shared, distributed ledger capable of recording the origin, location, and ownership of raw materials and products at each stage of the value chain – giving manufacturers, partners, and customers the transparency and authentication they need. Thanks to their ability to immutably track and share genealogy across multiple stakeholders, Blockchain and IoT can inhibit counterfeiting in ways that traditional technologies cannot.
The clear benefits of Modex BCDB and IoT
End-to-end oversight of raw materials reduces product defects
Since Blockchain with IoT serves as a single, immutable source of provenance data, companies can prevent defects due to fake parts and cut down on the labor spent validating materials and satisfying regulatory requirements. The moments when a product shows up at a warehouse and when it leaves are recorded in a verifiable event log which is easily accessible to all stakeholders. Manufacturers and suppliers can use Modex BCDB (Blockchain Database) platform to authenticate items, flag deviations from agreed-upon sourcing arrangements, and prevent defective and inferior components from entering the production system. The improved visibility safeguards customers and protects the company from the risk of recalls, lawsuits, and reputational damage while lowering operating costs.
Data provided by Smart Tags stored in a blockchain database reduces the likelihood of fraudulent sales
This allows manufacturers, channel partners, third-party retailers, customers, and regulators to verify a product’s authenticity as goods move through the value chain, making it harder for counterfeit goods with adulterated labels to escape detection. Real-time authentication ensures that the preponderance of sales and revenues goes to legitimate brands and manufacturers. Regulators can digitally trace the provenance and chain of custody for any product being sold.
Better tracing helps support centres prevent unnecessary servicing and repair. Front-end applications linked to the Modex BCDB platform make it easy for support representatives to verify whether a claim is genuine, even without seeing the product. Faster and more accurate authentication allows support personnel to direct more of their time and resources to legitimate, high-value purposes, improving responsiveness, reducing waste, and increasing customer satisfaction.
About Modex BCDB
Currently, the majority of blockchain solutions present on the market are oriented towards blockchain as a service, limiting themselves to a rigid view and application of the technology. A company or the CTO of a company can come to the realisation, after a bit of study that their business can solve several issues and streamline back-end processes by implementing blockchain. The problem is that in order for a company to implement blockchain technology only through its own tech team, they need to invest a significant amount of time and resources to study what type of blockchain is most suited for their needs, and commence a lengthy process of learning the development specificity of the respective blockchain, as well as scouting for developers proficient in the technology.
Better tracing helps support centres prevent unnecessary servicing and repair.
Modex BCDB is a new take on blockchain technology which removes the need to invest resources in blockchain training and facilitates fast adoption of the technology in businesses. The solution proposed by Modex is a middleware which fuses a blockchain with a database to create a structure which is easy to use and understand by developers with no prior knowledge in blockchain development. As a result, any developer who knows to work with a database system can operate with our solution, without needing to change their programming style or learn blockchain. Through our blockchain component, Modex BCDB is able to transform with minimal changes any type of database into a decentralised database which holds the same valuable characteristics inherent to blockchain technology: transparency, increased security, data immutability, and integrity.
Modex BCDB is a new take on blockchain technology which removes the need to invest resources in blockchain training and facilitates fast adoption of the technology in businesses.
Every enterprise is reserved and unwilling to make changes to its database, and for good reason, as data loss or data corruption constitute major risks. Modex BCDB doesn’t work by deleting the existing database, or data entries. The database is maintained intact throughout the process, data integrity is ensured by calculating the metadata of the records and storing it on the blockchain. Moreover, the system does not restrict access to the blockchain or to the database, so when a developer needs to make a reporting or ETL transformations, they can always perform warehouse analytics by accessing the database directly. This is because Modex BCDB has been purposely designed to be agnostic. With our solution, clients are able to set up a network, regardless of the type of database employed. In a consortium, each company can maintain what type of database they prefer (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Mogo DB), and connect them through a blockchain-powered network to ensure cohesion, availability while protecting corporate interests.
