Following an announcement in May 2019, Singaporean company Blockchain Wine Pte Ltd has launched its direct to consumer wine marketplace built on the Ethereum blockchain, backed by Asian wine cellar The House of Roosevelt and using EY’s OpsChain solution.
The wine marketplace is called TATTOO, which stands for traceability, authenticity, transparency, trade, origin and opinion.
In terms of how blockchain is implemented in the marketplace, each bottle of wine is be “tattooed” with a unique QR code linking the wine with a corresponding token. Using a mobile app to scan the code will provide users with provenance details about the wine, including how it was transported, the vineyard, and where it was processed.
EY claims the technology has already been used to tokenize “more than 11 million bottles of wine for multiple clients.” using Ethereum’s ERC-721 standard for non-fungible tokens (the same token standard used for CryptoKitties).
Speaking about the TATTOO platform, Tim Tse, founder and Chairman of Blockchain Wine said:
TATTOO helps reduce layers of distribution and helps address the issues of counterfeit wines, optimizes supply chains, facilitates trade and empowers both wineries and consumers.
EY’s Global Blockchain leader Paul Brody is unsurprisingly bullish on blockchain, saying:
We’re now entering an era where thousands of companies will routinely be pushing production data onto the Ethereum Mainnet – creating, offering and selling digital tokens that represent their products and services to consumers
Of course, the blockchain provenance approach is not new, and comes with significant challenges. For one, it remains unclear how or whether EY‘s system can overcome the "garbage data in, garbage data out problem". Similarly, while EY claims that TATTOO is the "first e-commerce platform in the world enabled by blockchain", it remains to be seen how the platform will fare in the crowded and competitive wine industry, particularly as various other entities are preparing to address the same problems.
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