Since the advent of e-commerce, trading has been a whole lot easier, and has been quite different from the traditional face-to-face settings. This is because of the obvious advantages of the e-commerce platforms over the traditional conventional trading platforms, which includes; accessibility of products and descriptions, wider coverage, easier payment options, and most importantly; ease of branding products. But these also opened up the world to a new level of threat in the e-commerce platforms; and that is the threat of counterfeiting.
COUNTERFEITING AND COUNTERFEITERS
Because of the viability and versatility of the e-commerce platforms, some ill-minded people have leveraged on that to perpetuate counterfeiting on unsuspecting traders. Maybe this would give you an insight: Statistical analysis has proven that counterfeiting leads to a loss of a whopping $600billion just in the U.S alone. Okay use this figure to know what could be obtainable in a country like China with about 1/6 of the total population of the world. No doubt, counterfeiting has been a menace, not just in the crypto space, but in the entire e-commerce platforms; which has also affected big names in the industry - the likes of; Amazon, Gucci et al. If these could be victims of counterfeiting then it is an issue to be treated with utmost urgency.
Even from the side where I grew up, people have been falling victims of counterfeiting even without knowing, because they would appear similar to the original, and even appear to be a little cheaper. I; for one; have experienced this - sometimes in the past, I ordered for a device, and on getting the device, I only discovered it was not what I hoped for. Even when I decided to manage it, I didn't use it up to 2weeks before it totally stopped working. Imagine how I felt to lose money to fake product.
No doubt, fake products have been seen to be hampering e-commerce, which has also caused damages to even human health and life, and this has greatly led to massive loss of faith in e-commerce. Big brands have been fighting tooth-and-nail to ward off counterfeits, but hey!! A solution has been found for y'all - SimplyBrand it is.
SIMPLYBRAND; THE PANACEA
In the pursuit of the vision to fight counterfeiting and counterfeiters, Kaufman Chang and Ronnie Ng; together with a highly skilled team of experts came up with the idea to leverage on the combined strength of Machine Learning (and AI), blockchain, and crowd-sourcing to check for fake products, and that was how SimplyBrand was birthed.
No doubt, the blockchain has been known for one thing; among others; and that is "immutability", and this is one of the major tools in the hands of SimplyBrand to fight counterfeits, because the application is; itself; built on the ethereum blockchain. How do they hope to achieve this? SimplyBrand is set to make a blockchain copy of the names of retailers that have been proliferating fake products, and by this, there would be more transparency in e-commerce platforms, while at the same time saving costs. This is also where the crowd-sourcing comes into play, and there's also a need to incentivize data-sourcing personnels; which has also led to the creation of an erc-20 token for the SimplyBrand ecosystem - and that is SBA tokens.
The SBA tokens would be the internal cryptocurrency of the SimplyBrand ecosystem, which people can stake to become part of the ecosystem. Then after completing a task of verifying products, checking for counterfeits, and collating the result in database, they would be remunerated with these tokens. Also, you as an individual can join this fight against counterfeiting by making a report of fake products to SimplyBrand. I'm sure you are now piqued to get the SBA tokens; presale has already started.
PARTICIPATING IN PRESALE
In view of the launch of the SBA tokens, SimplyBrand has gotten the support of cobinhood (which is a reputable zero-fee cryptocurrency trading platform) to provide services for the presale which was kicked off on January 10 2019, and set to run till March 23 2019. Here's a breakdown of the token sales details:
- Token Name: SBA Token
- Symbol: SBA
- Type: Ethereum-based Erc-20
- Amount of tokens for sale: 160m SBA
- Price of Tokens: 0.00025Eth/SBA
- Hard Cap: 40,000 Eth
- Soft Cap: 4,000 Eth
If you want to participate in the presale, please move over to the presale page and check out the guidelines for participation; in the words of SimplyBrand:
Every purchase does matter - SimplyBrand
To get more info, you can check out any of the social media handles:
Disclaimer: The content of this article does not suffice for a financial advice, please do well to make your own research.
All images (with the exception of the second one created by me) were gotten from https://simplybrand.io/en/
