A summary of the greater problem and proposed solution:
The rise of AI technology has unleashed a surge in identity theft, deep-fake-based crime, and misinformation. It's only the latest generation of a bigger problem.
Replica and counterfeit physical product sale volumes are higher than ever as vendors and buyers have instant global access without the need to have more than an online profile.
Counterfeiting, replication, and imitation for gain is as old as human civilization, and nothing has been able to stop it and probably never will.
Nevertheless, I propose a solution that can add a digital layer to mitigate digital deception, whether that be to verify the authenticity of tangible or intangible products using the blockchain and NFTs.
The following white paper outlines one example case, which also demonstrates how the use of this technology has application across every aspect of commerce, copyright, IP, and even individual identity protection.
TWG Genuine Product Verification and Supply Chain Tracking Using the Blockchain and NFTs (and NFT Cocktails)
Digital Marketers Often Don't Know They Are Facilitating Crime
Deceiving and misleading consumers has become normalized through out the internet. How many times do you feel excited about something only to become disappointed? As a digital marketer, one has to be very wary of who is asking you to do what.
Mitigating the damage to consumers, businesses, and markets, due to ambiguous product labels and descriptions across marketplace platforms is essentially impossible.
TheWebGorillas is working on a solution for this at a nation-state level.
by Diesel C (Lead Product Architect, The Web Gorillas)
While certified logos and traditional online databases are one way to verify if a product is genuine, there are still many ways that these obsolete technologies are failing consumers in a big way. Faked logos on dolphin-free tuna abound, and brand logos do little to prove a product is genuine.
Counterfeit products are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the sheer volume of products that are being sold as if they are something else. Vendors are riding on the reputation of a particular location, culture, history, and other "attributes," when in fact the products have none.
Online Marketplace: Descriptive Product Titles and Introductions vs. Deception and Misleading
With so many online marketplaces providing a place for unvetted vendors to resell products from unverified sources, the use of ambiguous product labeling (titles), and even more creative descriptions, raises a number of legal issues that need to be looked at, rights fought for, and laws to be decided on.
For example, is a vendor on Etsy or any other big marketplace claiming a product is from Colombia and Colombian-made when the product’s title is “Colombian Earrings”?
While the vendor isn’t technically claiming anything, it’s easy enough for a consumer to believe that the earrings are from Colombia and Colombian-made.
It can take many hours of back-and-forth and online research to verify a vendor and a product's source.
But who’s going to spend hours finding out that before buying when everything looks right and the platform has such a reputable brand and name?
“Creative” product marketing is a real phenomenon; if it weren’t, there wouldn’t be so many cheaply made products being described with association to a region or country.
Search “Colombian Earrings” on any marketplace and you will see the volume of results; only one example of many other products and product categories that are associated with that country and many others.
In effect, creative (deceptive) online product labeling (titles) and product details (descriptions) do more than damage the reputation of those countries that genuinely make them. Reputation damage happens at very high speed without care for international borders or language barriers.
Example Marketplace: Where is the proof? What makes it a “genuine Colombian necklace” that also ships from the United States?
Reputation Damage by Association
Reputation damage rapidly becomes financial losses, not just for the country but for everyone in that country’s particular industry, in the form of lower salary levels and lost jobs as demand fades.
Let’s play out the case in point: the consumer who buys the “Colombian Earrings” and is very disappointed and chooses to spreads the word via social media. The consumer is one of many tens of thousands over time.
Even though the earrings were not made in Colombia and were not Colombian, the association by description damages the reputation of Colombian jewelry worldwide. It’s not as if one vendor is selling “Colombian Earrings"; many tens of thousands are.
Ultimately, the income of ordinary workers in Colombia falls as demand for their products fall.
You don’t see products that are described as "Australian." For example, try and find a vendor selling “Australian Surfie Pants." This can only be attributed to Australia's “Australian Made” campaign, launched back in 1986.
The campaign has done more than deter and combat counterfeiters, sounding out a loud warning to unscrupulous marketplace vendors not to imply or claim their products are Australian.
Copying the Australian Made and Other Certified Product Logos
The same problem with the Australian Made campaign and the logo. Only policing the logo’s use can stop counterfeiting. The logo is on an item or published via any medium doesn’t guarantee the item is truly Australian-made.
The logo and sticker label are easier to counterfeit than the product it is being used on, as is the case with numerous other “guarantee labels” around the world. From dolphin-free tuna to recycling labels, many are copied and are rarely accounted for.
The reality is that real people lose real jobs, and more real people have less work per week; less money to put food on the table because the products they produce are competing with “creatively described” products that are low quality made on the cheap.
Counterfeiting screams organized crime, but misleading consumers with descriptive terminology is barely even mentioned, discussed, and mostly goes noticed. There is a very fine line between being descriptive and deceptive.
It’s easier than ever for consumers to believe what they scan-read because we are faced with a massive volume of content to get to what we are looking for or we think we are looking for.
It’s easier to believe than it is to put the effort into researching for the truth. The rapid rise of AI/LLM-regenerated junk content consuming web and social media sites encourages herd decision-making and judgment. The following quote goes a long way to understanding why.
“When you don’t possess sufficient information to solve a given problem, or if you just don’t want to or have the time for processing it, then it can be rational to imitate others by way of social proof.”
“Genuine” or False Advertising or Deceptive Marketing?
The sheer size of marketplace platforms has made it impossible to moderate all of the content they host. That’s why you see “report this product/post” links everywhere. Click the report button does not mean any action will be taken.
As in the case presented and the example product screenshot above, the vendor is not claiming the product is actually made in Colombia.
However, a quick look at the laws and governing bodies related to advertising in the United States, shows that it starts to look as if descriptive marketing is deception and therefore illegal. But who is going to do anything about it anyway?
Section 12 of the FTC Act states very clearly that “a false advertisement” is any advertisement that is “misleading in a material respect.”
"Unlawful advertising can be broken down into different types, including false advertising, misleading or deceptive advertising, and unfair advertising."
Law Offices of David H. Schwartz, Inc.
“The Lanham Act also prohibits a number of activities, including trademark infringement, trademark dilution, cybersquatting, false advertising, false endorsement, and false designation of origin.”
Consumers and Makers Essentially Have No Real Rights
Different nations have similar, very different, and almost identical laws when it comes to deceptive and misleading marketing, but the resulting rights they present are pretty much the same.
Whether or not misleading and deceptive product advertising is illegal or legal is essentially irrelevant unless you have the big bucks to fight out for your rights. Whether the act is criminal or civil, and in the case of deceptive marketing, consumers and makers only have the right to complain, take legal action against the advertiser to stop selling and advertising and recover damages as a result of their deceptive practices.
When it comes to the people losing their jobs in Colombia or somewhere else, we are at the same stalemate. Policing and enforcement on a scale that only multinational corporations can afford is the only current defense against deceptive marketing, or is it?
NFTs and Decentralized Blockchain Technology: A Solution to Proof of Supply Chain and Genuine Products
When most people think of NFTs, they think they are some kind of digital image that somehow is owned and cannot be copied.
Purchasing presumably investable NFTs became popular in 2021 as a result of artists, museums, and up-and-coming companies like Yuga Labs (who made the Bored Ape Yacht Club) and Larva Labs (who made Crypto Punks).
Celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Lindsay Lohan also started to mint their own blockchain-based digital assets that could be bought with cryptocurrency.
By the end of 2023, all of the hype and resulting NFT boomed and busted.
While everyone knows cryptocurrencies are a way to exchange value, NFTs can be used to create a historical record of products, source materials, locations, and processes with limitless detail.
Genuine Products and the Traditional Supply Chain
For a product to be genuine, it has to have a brand or trademark or genuinely be made in a specific location. However, simply creating brands and trademarks for products and companies is one thing, but creating nation-state branding and trademarks is a huge job to police.
Trademarks are the registration of a brand logo or something similar that is just as easily copied as the counterfeit products they are labeled with.
Traditional supply chain management and tracking are sloppy at best. The traditional supply chain management systems are operated in isolation from each other as well as from other third parties and from other participants and are not capable of providing comprehensible provenance.
Traditional supply chain management is being sold as the ultimate solution to industry as something that is constantly improving, is real-time, and offers a host of irreplaceable and profit-generating services and complex full-service functionality.
From supply inventory management, logistics, product tracking, and automated industrial production, including production tracking and quality control, to fleet management and distribution management enhanced with AI that can predict where to deliver products before they are actually ordered, traditional supply chain management makes very big claims that it isn’t delivering.
“More than three-fourths of supply chain executives are not prepared to observe and predict changes that may disrupt the flow of their business. Part of the problem is that much of it is not automated—these professionals report spending nearly 14 hours a week manually tracking data on inventory and shipments.”
Technology Still Doesn’t Supply The Insights Needed For Supply Chains—Forbes
With so many systems and so many methods of tracking and counting, supply chain management is increasingly a best-matched, hard-patched, difficult, and time-consuming operation.
Combine that with systems that are not always even semi-integrated, the massive amount of computing power required, and numerous intermediators to manually bandage together key data transfers because the technologies don't align, and traditional supply management should be labeled sluggish, inaccurate, and wasteful at best.
When QC representatives of a brand check products being loaded into a container at the manufacturer's site, the seals on the containers are old-school, and there's little automation or way of recording other than manual data entry or scanned data entry, which isn't going to be 100% correct all of the time.
If we can have a record of every single component, raw material, suppliers, locations, manufacturers, and manufacturing processes, then we can create something that can also prove the final product is genuine.
How NFTs Represent Final Products Full Production History
NFT supply chain development on blockchain technology is enabling accurate tracking of items from the location of the ground and the materials that were used to transportation and manufacturing facilities to inventory.
NFTs can be used to record every aspect of the whole production process. Distributed blockchain technology can be simplified as a complete accounting ledger that is verified by numerous independent accountants for each transaction. Not only is the transaction verified, but every transaction in the complete blockchain is verified to ensure the correctness of the accounting of all transactions.
Blockchain technology is encrypted, provides a safer environment, and provides intermediate-less service. The technology system can support the commercial sector more quickly and reliably.
To apply this to product manufacturing from source materials and everything in between until the assembly of the final product, individual NFT representing all of the components and processes of a particular supply chain, of any size, from a brand’s sandals to a country’s rare metal mining through to final jewelry products, is what we are working on.
Smart contracts are digital agreements made during the exchange of NFTs.
To realize the decentralized NFT supply chain and genuine product unique signature technology that TWG is developing to label and guarantee that a product is 100% Colombian-made and 100% made in Colombia by Colombians, two types of non-fungible tokens have been decided on:
NFT Type-1 Physical Product
Representing physical goods in the form of NFTs and specific agreements that enable their transformation. For example, and very dumbed down, a particular leather stock is essential for a high-quality leather sandal for women.
In actual fact, we’ve already created thousands of NFTs representing all the types of genuine Colombian leather stock available and hundreds of footwear, bags, fashion accessory categories, and subcategories of thousands of individual final consumer products..
NFT Type-2 Functionality
Additional functionality like certifying goods, transferring, splitting, and combining NFTs facilitates cross-business traceability, which is essential for Colombia's leather consumer goods market. A simple example for this type of NFT can be used by a manufacturer.
In the case of ensuring whether a product is genuine or not, NFTs are transferred to represent a particular process that has taken place, and modifiable goods are managed by smart contracts in a decentralized setting, which record their creation, transformation, and trade.
This makes it easier to track the origin of the commodities as well as the genuine nature of the production process inputs. which includes tangible supplied materials and so-called tangible inputs, such as the processes that particular genuine products go through.
Every category of goods in the supply chain, whether it is for a specific business or sector, industry, or even a country, will have a smart contract created that establishes NFTs within the products that reflect physical products, production processes, transportation, distribution, inputs, and location.
Because distributed blockchain independently verifies each, every, and all transactions of the production process at slightly different times throughout the accounting, each individual final product in a batch as well as individual one-off products will have a unique transaction history.
This means that the final products will have a final transaction history in the blockchain; even if we are talking about 400,000 pairs of adidas shell-toe Run DMC shoes, each pair will qualify as genuine if it has records in the blockchain of all required attributes, as well as having a unique NFT signature (inside the NFT Cocktail (aggregate NFT)) for each. This project is bigger than we can take on alone.
Making the NFTs that Function for the Purpose of Supply Chain and Genuine Product Verification
Because each product has a unique NFT signature resulting from accurate historical transactions and from the unique timing of those transaction verifications across multiple machines throughout the decentralized blockchain network, the functionality of the blockchain not only enables supply chain monitoring but also verification of the final product.
Standards for non-fungible tokens make it easier to represent unique assets digitally. A legitimate product will include NFTs that depict every step of the production process, from the locations and raw material supply to the manufacturing procedures and quality control inspections.
An excellent example of where this technology can be used in Colombia is in the leather footwear and accessories sector, which is a very traditional sector with many historical influences, including Spanish training and the arrival of Arabic peoples, who taught the art of making sandals, and why sandals made in Colombia are of extreme quality today.
Despite not getting the recognition for it and their reputation as a sexy and fashionable country to sell flip-flops and the like, are made in cheaper than Mainland China, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos.
Over time, the number of NFTs for attributes, products, actions, inputs, and cross-industry operations will grow. This will allow us to greatly increase the participation of all business operators, from small to large.
It is our strategy to work with industry markets and sectors that have independent governing bodies, or in many cases, these bodies are more informal, where the heads of business get together to discuss the issues of their industry; the Colombian Jewelry Association is one of these, and in discussions with us, several key members have stated that deceptive product marketing is having a huge impact on their business.
Our tokens cannot be fractioned as they comprise the unique specifications and resemblances of unique assets.
These unique characteristics bring the substantial features of NFTs to the supply chain by facilitating the representation of unique goods and precise tracking.
This unique token standard and smart contracts secure the modifiable goods from damage and other fraudulent activities in the supply chain.
There are risks and failures associated with tracking products through traditional supply chain and record-keeping methods used by both suppliers and customers.
Because NFTs are non-transferable and non-modifiable, supply chain and record-keeping information can be combined and distributed among suppliers and customers.
Non-fungible tokens are not tradable. This makes it easier for similar commodities to be distinguished from one another.
To put this idea into practice, the contract owner generates digital tokens with the approval of the MiC platform following the production or procurement of a batch of goods in the real world.
Once the supply chain and the production process are defined, the next step is to analyze the actions, including the tangible and intangible inputs for that supply chain.
A smart contract will be set up for each type of good or process in the supply chain. Within such smart contracts, tokens can be created that represent physical goods or services provided, such as the transport of products from one facility to another.
Using Smart Contracts to Combine NFT Assets to Build a Composite and Complete Product NFT (NFT Cocktail)
It is important to note that the non-fungible tokens do not have any financial value except for the fact that they ultimately add and retain value of the products they protect from misleading products and counterfeits.
The platform itself can be hosted anywhere and managed by a small number of TWG developers, with auxiliary staff working to define more detailed attributes of products, which ultimately are combined in the final product ready for sale, which many NFTs become in this system, NFT Cocktails.
The application consists of procedures that are automatically executed by meeting the necessary requirements.
For instance, the transaction will appear in the supplier's records once the delivery procedure is completed if the payment is made in accordance with the smart contract for the conveyance of particular supplier products or services.
The smart contract starts the reimbursement procedure. When there is a malfunction or error in the process, your payment as a buyer is safe (flagged and frozen for review and reversal) because of this consensus-building technique.
The construction of a decentralized NFT supply chain is predicated on two main concepts:
Using NFTs to represent tangible products, services, and processes, along with formulas to facilitate their transition, yields a final NFT with all of the history.
How Will the Platform Work?
Starting with particular location-based market sectors, the platform TWG is developing requires a main operating body and, so far, a number of other categories that will require the provision of NFTs and a way to use them.
As the main operating body, TWG intends to run and continually develop the blockchain in the same location it manages other necessities of running nation-state branding as defense against marketplaces and other online vendors abusing the popular and fashionable qualities of genuine products
This includes the following tasks, among many more, that will grow over time:
- Deciding on what is required to be a certified business.
- Certifying businesses as businesses.
- Collecting yearly fees and implementing yearly renewal certifications.
- Global digital marketing management..
Market Entry Strategy
Our strategy is to start small and work with individual companies and brands. When we talk about supply chain management, we are not thinking global trade, we are on the supply chain that is required by one company, because each of those companies are linked to other companies
.As we accumulate with individual manufacturers, sectors, sectors, and niche markets, we will further clarify which attributes of a supply chain are common denominators.
We are also looking at other groups and market players that all need integration into the blockchain. We have no doubt that this list will expand along with the attributes of the NFTs they will use and require
- Resource suppliers
- Raw material suppliers
- Secondary suppliers
- Service suppliers
- Transport providers
- Manufacturers (all sizes)
- Distributors
- Logistics
- Warehousing
- Retailers
- Consumers
What Results Can Be Expected?
Ultimately, the goal is to eliminate bad actors who stop using a nation-state’s name and associating that with their products, therefore repairing a constantly damaged reputation, further active reputation management for products, and by providing undeniable product verification, raising the value through global consumer appreciation and demand.
Because of the size of this task, working with traditional and highly skilled consumer productions, such as is the case in the leather and accessories industry, we expect to see a considerable uptick in international respect for the products of this industry around the world, which will lead to an immediate increase in demand and the amount of money people are willing to pay for such products.
What Results Can Be Expected?
TWG is also developing a global online store that will strictly feature genuine products. The first stage will be launched focusing on the United States, with products already in-country when released online. This first online store can be thought of as a digital flagship brand store. It will allow consumers to purchase and feel products, bringing the tangible to the intangible nature of digital marketing.
TheWebGorillas is completely transparent about its operations, and we don't have a problem with helping others earn more as we do to.
How Consumers Verify Products Before Purchasing
In our case, TheWebGorillas is working on verification for particular businesses.
When a consumer decides they want to buy a particular product, each product comes with its own NFT matching the serial number of the physical product.
The NFT information for the product the consumer wants to buy must be provided from the seller. The consumer can verify the product is genuine by verifying all production transactions through the MiC blockchain app, which is simply impossible to counterfeit.
Modeled NFT and Product Verification App
The app is very easy to use and puts all the responsibility on the seller to prove that they are selling genuine products to match their claims. With this kind of power, blatantly deceptive and criminally minded vendors will start to feel the pinch very quickly with mass consumer awareness campaigns on Youtube.
It's always better to shut down the vendors instead of the alternative, which is nothing unless you can afford to pay a lawyer to fight your case over cheap Colombian earrings. As for countries, regions, and cultures that are being ripped off and having their credibility destroyed while vendors earn from lies, our NFT supply chain and product verification solution will have a very big impact.
More than just advertising, based on our research, it won't take long before we generate a following and social impact that will then make it hard to lie and cheat on what you sell.
You don't need to be in an actual store to verify the products you are buying ar real.
Where to From Here?
Tje concept was first conceived in 2019 when COVID hit, but as a distributed network of digital professionals, we did manage to keep planning this huge undertaking while trying to maintain our individual incomes.
This technology will catch on and can be applied to all areas of production, including protecting the creative rights of musicians and vocalists, for example, in a world where AI is already being used to steal and copy voice signatures.
As we enter the later half of 2024, we are continue to work on the verification blockchain, and we are showing it to different industry sectors.