MonoChain offers a ledger based on blockchain technology that shows who owns what, who is an authorized licensee, and so on, would enable everyone in the supply chain, including consumers and customs authorities, to validate a genuine product and distinguish it from a fake. MonoChain allows for provenance authentication, since verifiable details can be recorded objectively about when and where products are made, and raw materials used.
Fashion companies have the opportunity of extending their relationship with the customer and monetization of the product well beyond current limits by providing a value-add service of reducing the risk of being caught out by counterfeit fraud and facilitating opportunities to re-sell the product at the end of its life with a particular customer.
MonoChain is a B2B solutions partner for global fashion companies, providing them with the opportunity to extend relationships with their customers (and – vitally – their lifetime value). Specifically, MonoChain can transform the secondary market but allowing firms to facilitate the onward sale of fashion items.
How does MonoChain work now: Every time a user buys an item, he/she receives his/her Certificate of Ownership, a Non-Fungible Token (NFT). The user has the opportunity to enter it into the MonoChain wallet. When that is done, the user can receive offers to sell them on real time. If user 1 (Seller) decides to sell this item to user 2, the item is send to a Moderator for verification first. There will be a Ricardian Contract using a Multisig Escrow. This means that NFT and money will be held into a separate wallet. If the Moderator verifies the item is authentic, the NFT and the product moves to the Buyer and the Seller receives the money. Every time ownership changes this will be recorded into a Private Blockchain (Hyperledger Sawtooth), but eventually we plan to move into the public Blockchain.
MonoChain Value Proposition & Business Model
At the moment, the customer journey on the primary market happens as follows:
- The user discovers an item they like
- they evaluate and decide to purchase it.
As far as retailers are concerned the customer journey ends there. However, for approximately 1/6 of items, their owner decides to sell them after a while entering a new customer journey. Resale marketplaces have no idea where this item has come from and whether they are stolen or from the grey market. They verify the item authentication and then send the item to the buyer.
We have built MonoChain to be a bridge between primary and the resale markets in order to facilitate reselling. We make it super simple, a frictionless experience for users to sell an item they own and we enable fashion retailers to enter the circular economy.
Our solution will have a great sustainability impact. Firstly, it will lead to an increase the ability to track the source of materials to be used in production (e.g. provide traceability). Secondly, it will increase utilization rate and decrease the risk of throwing away clothes after minimal use. Thirdly, it will enable easier recycling and automated sorting of clothing based on textile components (e.g. easier to separate polyester clothes from cotton clothes).
MonoChain facilitates selling and buying second-hand items. For sellers, they know that they can get a price premium on items proved to be authentic, so they are incentivised to sell. Protecting branded product from grey market and diversion activities is of continued concern to all luxury brands, and MonoChain can be an effective tool in identifying grey market product, to whom it had been sold originally, and how it may have ended up in the grey market. MonoChain is not creating a coin/token to monetise it’s solution, but instead it makes money through transaction fees and revenue share. Every item an item change hands, it gets paid.
