Bitcoin Global News (BGN)
March 26, 2019 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- Why would a luxury goods
retailer want a blockchain? Today, CoinDesk announced that Louis
Vuitton plans to launch its’ own blockchain in-house, to help solve
what is perhaps the biggest problem that they and their competitors
have.
To understand what this is and why
using a blockchain to tackle it is important, think about the fact
that the market for counterfeit luxury goods is massive. One
particular 2017 report estimated that the global counterfeit goods
market was bringing in around $460 billion a year.
Louis Vuitton aims to launch a
blockchain to monitor the authenticity of luxury goods from
end-to-end, which it will roll out to all of its’ brands, followed
by those of certain, undisclosed competitors.
At face value, this idea is nothing
particularly new or novel. In its’ simplest form, a blockchain is a
digital ledger that tracks the movement of assets. Here, it is easy
to estimate that the Louis Vuitton chain will be no different,
except for what will likely be a feature that helps them to scan
each product in circulation onto the blockchain.
To understand what this might be,
think RFID. Essentially, this is an improvement upon barcode
scanning because companies can have items scanned via radio waves,
so they do not have to see each one.
The reason why Louis Vuitton’s
effort may be more successful than many other similar projects is
that they have been working with partners like Microsoft Azure and
ConsenSys for about a year already. More specifically, CoinDesk
mentions that the blockchain will be called AURA and is built on
Quorum, which is basically a private version of the Ethereum main
chain.
Quorum also now appears to be
hosted by J.P. Morgan, which brings the question of whether AURA
will ever be allied with JPM Coin in any fashion. For now, because
of their distinctly different use cases, this appears unlikely.
Still, since Louis Vuitton plans to sell the rights to its’
blockchain to a third-party, perhaps AURA will be one of the first
blockchains to attain the status of an industry
standard.
By: BGN Editorial Staff