NFT has taken the world by storm with a digital artwork selling at $69 million to a New York Times article on NFT that was turned into an NFT and then sold for over half a million dollars.NFT is essentially a tool that uses blockchain technology to provide proof of ownership of a digital asset such as an artwork, a pdf file, or even an invoice.
But far from the frenzy, the blockchain-based non-fungible tokens could soon turn out to be the perfect partners for enterprises as now enterprises would be able to convert several of their assets into NFTs and use them to raise funds, offer traceability to customers or just trade them in open market similar to how NFT art is sold.
An Indian Blockchain startup KoineArth is releasing its Enterprise NFT-as-a-service to enable just that.
Bangalore-based KoineArth has developed this new platform marketsN in partnership with Tezos to enable enterprises to leverage Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFTs) to add value to their Supply Chains.
“With marketsN, we’ll allow enterprises to leverage blockchain and allow them to convert pretty much anything into NFTs. These NFTs can then be used to raise money through things like invoice financing to offering visibility into supply chain across the stakeholders,” Praphul Chandra, founder, KoineArth, told ETCIO.
Giving an example of how this’ll work, Chandra said, “In the shipping business, if an exporter loads a container on a shipping line, the shipping line gives a bill of lading and then this paper is couriered to the importer and it is then given to the shipping line to take ownership of the goods. This bill of lading can be converted into NFT and the entire process can be done using blockchain, which is a digitally auditable proof of ownership of the asset. It is very hard to determine the origin of a digital document. NFT proves who is the owner of the digital document, thereby turning it into a valuable asset.”
This service benefits many business scenarios where enterprises need to issue proof-of-ownership of products or documents. The technical architecture combines the functionality of permission-control smart contracts with Tezos NFT framework to solve many essential use cases in supply chain.
One immediate application area of application KoineArth is deploying is “Product Passport” – a digital record of any product from cradle to grave recording information like current-owner, service records, warranty claims etc. Similar to a passport, the “product passport” allows only pre-authorized service providers, recyclers to update the passport. KoineArth is piloting this solution with a leading car manufacturer in India. The service is easily extensible to products, which need to comply with EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) regulations for sustainability objectives.
KoineArth is also working on another application of the Enterprise-NFT service in Supply Chain Financing. This upcoming solution will enable invoices, purchase orders, bill-of-exchanges etc. to be converted to NFTs. The solution promises to have built-in proofs to verify the authenticity of every document from creation-to-surrender. Benefits will include reduce risk for lenders, faster approvals for borrowers and lower operations costs.
