The American company Seagate, one of the largest manufacturers of hard drives, in collaboration with IBM, will create blockchain-based solutions to counter the supply of counterfeit hard drives. It is reported by CoinDesk.

On Tuesday, November 6, companies said that Seagate drives would be registered on the IBM blockchain platform to prevent the use of fake products at IBM data centres, and in the future – to combat the spread of counterfeit among end users.

Bruce Anderson, global managing director for the IBM Electronics Industry, said that Seagate has been a reliable supplier of hard drives for IBM server centres for several years. The partnership aims to track every hard drive through the blockchain across the supply chain from the time of production. He says:

“If you look at when the drive enters the supply chain, when it gets built into servers, there’s a lot of hands that it passes through, and after the servers get deployed there’s quite a lot of folks who have access to the equipment. So … the challenge becomes, ‘are we dealing with an authentic piece of equipment or is this a substitution?'”

For authentication, Seagate products will be tagged with an electronic key that is stored on an IBM blockchain platform and can be verified at any time.

Andersen also noted that, in addition to tracking Seagate drives, the blockchain platform as a whole will help improve supply chain processes, as well as optimize or eliminate redundant workflow. He says that such platforms will be taken “very quickly”, given the current scale of the problem of counterfeit. In a study conducted by the International Coalition against Counterfeiting, it is claimed that the global value of counterfeit or pirated goods in 2015 amounted to more than $ 1.7 trillion. According to it, IBM has already turned to other manufacturers who may be interested in using the blockchain to track their products.