European Union presents a project to fight counterfeiting through the use of NFTs by 2023

The European Union (EU) is working on a project that involves blockchain architecture and the use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to combat counterfeiting and forgery. The project is the product of several meetings organized by the EU Intellectual Property Office and proposes to create digital twins of products to trace their journey through supply lines.

EU to use NFTs to protect intellectual property

The European Union recently announced that it is working on a system that will use blockchain and NFTs as part of its fight against counterfeit physical goods.

The proposed system will be designed by the European Union Intellectual Property Office and is the result of more than five years of work. A document released this month explains that the organization has already chosen an architecture for the task, and details generalities about how the system will work.

Intellectual property (IP) holders will create digital tokens to prove that a group of assets produced is authentic. These IP holders will need to be previously included as approved signatories to create these products on the tracking blockchain.

The solution will then track the supply chain as products pass through various checkpoints, allowing IP holders to be certain that products arriving at stores are authentic.

Implementation

The European Union Intellectual Property Office hopes to have a system up and running by the end of 2023, but to achieve that goal, it will need to create a registry system to bring together all IP owners, logistics operations and retailers in the EU. To better achieve its goal, the report says the system will seek to be interoperable with existing supply chain tracking solutions.

If the EU is able to implement this system by the end of 2023, it will be one of the first applications of blockchain technology at this scale for the goal. However, blockchain technology has also been used for supply line tracking before. Recently, Vechain, an enterprise blockchain project, announced a supply chain tracking system in partnership with Orionone, a global supply chain technology solution, in an effort to integrate blockchain into its working technology stack.

The European Union is also currently discussing MiCA, a proposed EU-wide law to regulate crypto-currencies.