The online shopping giant Amazon patented a blockchain-based solution to provide the authenticity of the sold items.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office approved Amazonโs application for โDistributed Ledger Certificationโ (DLT) last week. The new Amazon blockchain solution will help to provide authenticity of the consumer goods, sold on the biggest online marketplace.
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The long-awaited approval comes after the three years from the tech giantโs initial filling. According to the document, as the society moves more activities across borders and into the virtual world, the ability to discern the trustworthiness of an item might become a difficult task:
Technologies for recording information continue to proliferate, but this proliferation presents a patchwork of systems and databases that can often lack transparency, coherency, referential integrity, or security, which can be factors impacting trust.
Meanwhile, retail behemoth Amazon aims to use a distributed ledger-based system to meet the needs of the growing demand for the trustworthiness of items or entities. With new blockchain technology, the online shopping giant hopes to introduce the software platform that enables all parts of the supply chain – from manufacturers, distributors to the final users – to benefit from real-time tracking and visibility of the item.
Furthermore, the document reveals that all the participants of the supply chain could be able to add events to the ledger after they complete registration with a certification authority. The same authority could as well apply rules to ensure the quality of items or require particular certification to continue the further moves within the supply chain.
The company claims that the new DLT based consumer goods authenticator allows better integration with a modern supply chain, since the traditional tracking and tracing solutions “mapped a limited portion of a supply chain, usually that part of the chain within the purview of the developer of the solution”. According to the document, the new solution applies features, that will:
Break this mold by building a lower-level set of open standards and services that provide a trustworthy framework for participants to use.
The supply chain is one of the most popular use cases for blockchain technology since it includes multiple parties, large volumes of data, and often lacks transparency. Meanwhile, when the data is stored in a decentralized database, the information is immutable and transparent. This means that it is almost impossible to change them fraudulently and without detection.