The collaboration between IOTA and EVRYTHNG announced today is designed specifically for making product supply chains transparent in order to meet the urging demands for sustainability from people and planet alike.

Supply chains are complex systems that currently lack transparency. Increasing transparency among supply chain stakeholders is already a daunting task. Exposing this transparency to consumers is even more difficult.

But what if consumers could demand transparency? Today’s consumers want to make informed choices about the products they purchase. Particularly in the food and fashion industry, provenance data can help consumers assess the authenticity and sustainability of the products they purchase.

Securing transparency with DLTs

Public distributed ledgers can help manufacturers open up supply chain data to their customers. Storing this data on distributed ledgers allows any customer to access it either from a dedicated app or with a simple web interface, without the need for any log-in detail or sharing of personal data.

EVRYTHNG’s mission is to give unique digital identities to a range of consumer goods. Using this identity, an object (like a handbag or a bottle of whiskey) can be followed along its production chain, while collecting data about its manufacturing process.

For luxury items, such data becomes important to prove their authenticity and can combat the half-trillion-dollar counterfeit industry. In the case of organic food, the same data is useful to prove compliance to high production standards.

The information contained in this data often fails to reach consumers in a trusted and transparent way. Instead, it remains siloed by manufacturers who face the challenge to prove the integrity and authenticity of this data to consumers.

When information is provided to customers via a centralized platform, it has often been aggregated by numerous actors in the supply chain and filtered through a middle man.

This increases the risks of tampering or false information and authenticity of consumer goods cannot be proven if there is no trust in the authenticity of the data used to prove it.

A first step is offered by new mobile technologies. Combined with a QR-code or other scanning and tagging technologies, unique digital identities can be used to link physical goods to their digital representation and provide their related data to consumers.

But this data is still not enough to prove the authenticity of the attached goods.

Distributed data integrity for digital doubles

IOTA is committed to providing data integrity by allowing data to be stored on a distributed ledger which is easy to access and available to everybody. IOTA’s distributed ledger, the Tangle, is ideal for these micro-transactions given its feeless and permissionless nature.

For a goods manufacturer, the feeless micro-transactions structure allows any of its business partners to send IOTA transactions without dealing with the complexity of setting up wallets and buying cryptocurrency.

For customers, accessing the IOTA ledger and the information shared on it does not require ownership of cryptocurrency nor to install a wallet. All involved actors can send small amounts of data to the IOTA ledger without the need to identify complex business models to cover the costs of managing this trust infrastructure.

Furthermore, IOTA’s permissionless nature allows users to access an always available and general purpose infrastructure provided as a service to deploy new applications.

This removes the need to first solve and define complicated governance rules and stakeholders agreements before any infrastructure can be deployed.

Supply Chains Transparency made easy for customers

With EVRYTHNG and IOTA technologies coming together, product data can be opened up to consumers with embedded authenticity and integrity.