Despite law enforcers’ best efforts, counterfeiting remains a major risk to consumers, sellers, and intermediaries alike. According to the OECD, half a trillion dollars were lost to this illegal practice worldwide in 2016.

North America and Europe are targeted the most by products that mimic the original brands, but fail to adhere to safety, security and quality standards. Ill-intended third parties take advantage of consumers’ brand loyalty, knowing that purchases are based on the sense of security and quality that a brand name carries.

Counterfeiters disguise an inferior product under the banner of a well-established and trusted brand to sell cheaply produced items that are below quality standards, but at almost the same price of the original brand. In exploiting consumers’ trust in brand names and the quality that their goods are known for, counterfeiters are able to turn a huge profit on items which cost a fraction of the normal price to produce and can even be dangerous in some cases.

If a consumer unknowingly purchases a counterfeit luxury bag, their pride may be hurt, but when a patient mistakenly consumes a counterfeited pharmaceutical drug or a child is injured by playing with a counterfeit toy that is produced with harmful materials, the stakes become much higher.

The prolific growth of counterfeit markets worldwide is driven by two main challenges which make counterfeiting near-impossible to combat. Firstly, counterfeit products are hard to identify, as they are designed to mimic the original products and mislead even the most attentive consumer.

Secondly, counterfeit products are extremely hard to track, particularly when their manufacturing and transportation process crosses many jurisdictions, sometimes overlooked by weak governance.

From the retailers’ side, the damage made to consumer confidence can be crushing for the brand’s reputation amidst its consumer base. The consumer is left defrauded and at risk. Finally, the official authorities in charge of fighting this illegal practice are left with an expensive and, frustrating mission.

In no other area is this truer than in the online retail market, where retailers have become obsessed with trust and credibility, which is difficult to build and easy to lose.

Introducing Devery

The advent of blockchain technology has offered a solution to these challenges. The ability to lock-in identification structures to verify the authenticity and origin of products can be stamped and registered in an immutable ledger that can be accessed by consumers, retailers and law enforcement alike.

This is the platform that Devery is developing for the e-commerce market. It runs a blockchain-powered open-sourced ecosystem that allows manufacturers, brands, retailers and any other party to imprint a unique digital signature on any traded item, which is then stored on the Ethereum network.

Put simply, Devery provides a solution for:

Secure distribution

Counterfeiting Protection

Supply Chain Transparency

This signature is not limited to digital products, but it can be physically imprinted in any item by using Near-field communication technology (used in contactless credit cards) or Radio Frequency Identification tech (used to physically track products in assembly lines, for example) to read the imprint on the product.

With this imprint, at any point in the product’s life, from production to delivery to the customer, the signature can be called off to verify the item’s location, date, point-of-origin, manufacturer and the entity in charge of the item’s verification.

It effectively removes the need for trust between the retailer and the costumer, and the authenticity of the product becomes instantly verifiable by everyone. Parties that come into contact with the item across the supply chain can also update those records as the item changes hands.

If the platform appears on the platform as unverified, retailers are much more easily capable to make adjustments to their supply chain and protect their reputation by moving away from unreliable suppliers.

According to the company, the platform can provide solutions to other verification and authenticity issues than those of the sale of physical goods and services, like documents and diplomas. With this structure, an employer can instantly verify a potential employee’s credentials for instance.

How does Devery work?

As described, the Devery platform provides an ecosystem in which companies can build their own specific applications to track their products throughout the supply chain and offer it to their customers. While being open-source, the platform is designed to save the need for any interaction with the complexities of the underlying smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Pre-developed smart contracts will be available as a package to developers, who can then easily build their applications on JavaScript within the Devery ecosystem.

These applications will allow the user to attribute a unique address to the product that will both identify the item and couple it with a fee account, all stored on the blockchain. The application itself will then be able to collect fees from the users to power the service and reward the node operator.

Entry Verification Engine – EVE Token

Those fees will be collected on the protocol’s own token named Entry Verification Engine, or EVE for short. EVE will be the engine that powers the creation of the unique signatures and its inscription, with all the data attached to the item, in the blockchain. Retailers and brands will be able to input their own information attached to that of the items in order to further build on the products’ authenticity and couple the brand name with all the products verified under its own public address. Every application will collect EVE tokens from the users of the application and deliver them to the owner of the system.

No gas needed

A very interesting development within the Devery ecosystem is that the developers are using Bokky’s Token Teleportation Service as a way to defer the gas costs for the transactions from the user to the blockchain node’s operator. The user is technically assigning instructions to the operator to pay the gas costs on its behalf, in Ethereum. The operator is then compensated with a percentage of EVE tokens paid by the user. In practice, what this means is that users are not required to own both EVE and Ethereum to use the platforms, which should go a long way in facilitating wide adoption.

Devery token sale

Devery will use Entry Verification Engine (EVE) as the platform’s internal payments engine.

Here are the details of the EVE token sale:

Token name: EVE

Token base: Ethereum (ERC-20)

Token supply: 100,000,000

Token sale duration: 14th December, 2017 – 11th January, 2018 (pre-sale) 17th of December 2017 due to reaching 50% of the Cap within a day | 12th January, 2018 – 10th February, 2018 (public token sale)

Token sale target: €10,000,000 (hard cap)

Devery’s Website

Devery’s whitepaper