Brandinate

We’re Brandinate — an early-stage venture exploring blockchain-based retail solutions. For HackFS 2022, we’re focusing on product data.

Problem: Maintaining Product Information across Fragmented Data Systems

Today, it's difficult for brand owners to ensure that consumers see the same product information wherever they shop.

Multiple distribution channels (e.g., selling at both Target and Walmart), industry partners (e.g., supply chain planning software), and geographies (e.g., selling in both the United States and Canada) require brand owners to input the same product data over and over again — i.e., the data silo problem.

Solution: Blockchain-Based Product Information Management

We’re prototyping a single, transparent data source for cryptographically secure, verifiable product information, managed on-chain by the brand owner, delivered instantly to stakeholders across the retail value chain — from e-commerce marketplaces to end consumers.

We call it a Universal Product Listing (or UPL).

Value Proposition: Foundational Product Data for dCommerce

Through UPLs, we enable: trusted product information, automated data transfer, improved consumer experience, and more.

We’re building on Ceramic, and we started by creating a new data model (JSON Schema) to define simple product attributes — product ID, company name, brand name, product name, product description, etc. We based this information on existing Web2 data formats (e.g., an Amazon product listing).

Now, we can use a Tile Document (CIP-8) to represent real-world product information, and because Ceramic allows for mutable JSON storage, brand owners can update this data over time.

To demonstrate what blockchain-based product information management might look like, we built a prototype with React and Ceramic’s Self.ID SDK (available at http://demo.brandinate.com/).

In this scenario, a brand owner might use 3ID DID (CIP-79) to perform transactions and 3ID Keychain (CIP-20) — so that multiple blockchain wallets can authenticate the same 3ID DID. For a brand owner, this would enable several members of the same organization to control product data or a third party to manage a brand’s product data as a service.

IPFS would store signed data on IPFS, and a scaling platform like Polygon could generate the large number of timestamps contained within anchor commits.