This blockchain-based tool can tell you whether you’re buying a fake product

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with Decrypt Asia where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews related to blockchain. This is heavily revised from the original transcript. For the full interview, go here or here.

Devery is an Australian company that uses blockchain to create a product verification tool. By ensuring the products’ authenticity, it allows ecommerce players and other businesses to know whether their supply chain is secure. The company recently concluded a successful ICO, reaching their hard cap in 17 seconds.

For this interview, I sat down with Devery’s founder and CEO, Andrew Rasheed. Rasheed has been heavily involved in the ecommerce space, founding several stores on Amazon and Shopify and creating the first Ethereum-only online store, Ethstall. Here are some highlights from our conversation.

Andrew Rasheed, CEO of Devery

How did you find the idea for Devery?

It came from my own experience being in the ecommerce space. Along with other people running Amazon and Shopify stores, I have experienced counterfeiting. I wondered if there was a way to actually mark products on the blockchain to prevent brands from being tarnished, from people taking over these products and sounding like they sell the same thing. There was no way to differentiate between the real product from the fake one.

Counterfeiting affects the entire industry from the manufacturers to the consumers. If there was a way to verify end-to-end items across the supply chain, that would help prevent this issue from occurring.

So, what we’re aiming to do at Devery is to prevent brands from being taken over and duplicated by third parties. We’ve built a protocol to allow third parties to develop verification apps on top of the software we’ve provided.

For example, you are a large brand and you want to mark each of your shoes as authentic. You can come to us so we can provide you a template application that allows you to mark specific items on the blockchain. You can use a mobile app to verify whether an item is counterfeit or genuine. If they want to, brands may also use the library that we’ve built to further track items all the way to the manufacturer.

Your protocol is just the base layer for the ecosystem. Will you be developing apps as well?

At the moment, our aim is to put out the tools that make building apps easier. We’re releasing a Javascript framework on top of the protocol so you won’t have to deal with a lot of complexities when building your own verification tool. But we’ll also develop apps and live demos to educate users.

The protocol itself can be adapted to different industries, dependent on what the company decides to build on top of it. It provides a lot of flexibility because when we spoke to various industries, we found that they have vastly different requirements. Only a custom solution can address their needs, and the smart contracts and the Javascript framework we provide make that process easier.

Can you tell us about the role of your token, EVE?

Consumers don’t interact with the token itself when they read product information on our protocol. But when a brand decides to mark items on the blockchain, that’s when the EVE token is required as the gas cost of actually placing an item on the blockchain.

If you’re an application host, that gas cost goes directly to you, and a small split goes to Devery. EVE is also used as an incentive to continue the ecosystem of applications built on top of our protocol.

Can you tell us more about your mechanism, which allows users to send tokens without requiring Ethereum as gas cost?

One of our team members and advisors, Bokky PooBah, created this system called the Bokky Token Teleportation Service. It basically allows EVE tokens to be transferred without gas cost on the users’ end. The idea behind it is that the gas cost is actually covered by a third party, which is paid out in EVE as an incentive for doing so. It allows for a more user-friendly experience.

On Ethereum, there’s only two projects that have implemented this at the moment: us and GazeCoin, which is another project Bokky works with.

Tell us about your work in ensuring safe food delivery in Tunisia using blockchain.

Where do you see the blockchain space heading in the next couple of years?