Cryptographic NFC seal + blockchain passport to authenticate physical products — and make counterfeiting unprofitable and detectable.
A tamper-evident NXP NTAG 424 DNA chip signs every scan (AES-128 SUN cryptogram); a per-product NFT anchors an immutable provenance record. The consumer just taps the product with a phone — no app to install — and sees AUTHENTIC or NOT AUTHENTIC. Aligned with the EU Digital Product Passport (mandatory from 2027).
This repository holds the full body of work: the market & technical study, a working MVP web app (wine vertical, real Solana NFTs), and the investor pitch.
| Folder | What it is |
|---|---|
study/ |
15 research documents — market, technical feasibility, business plan, go-to-market, financial model, risk analysis and verticals. Start at study/00-SUMMARY.md. |
app/ |
The MVP web app — Invenio Veritag. Next.js (App Router) · Tailwind · Prisma + Postgres · real NFTs on Solana. See app/README.md to run it and app/DEMO.md for the 5-minute live demo. |
presentation/ |
Standalone investor pitch deck (veritag-pitch.html) with live-app screenshots. |
Counterfeiting is a $467 Bn/year problem (OECD/EUIPO, 2021). QR codes are trivially copyable; high-end luxury authentication (Aura, Arianee) is locked up. The opportunity is the mid-market premium segment — spirits, wine, cosmetics, streetwear — where a $0.49 cryptographic chip readable by any smartphone, bundled with DPP compliance, is both affordable and defensible.
- The chip proves the tag — a genuine, unclonable AES cryptogram per tap.
- Tamper-evidence binds the tag to the product — a broken seal is a failed scan.
- The blockchain is the audit/provenance registry (DPP), not the verification engine.
The residual risk ("genuine tag on a fake product") is owned honestly and mitigated
by physical binding, controlled application and backend anomaly detection — see
study/05-tag-product-risk.md.
Invenio Veritag proves the loop end-to-end on real infrastructure:
- An estate registers a bottle and mints its passport as a real NFT on Solana (devnet) — artwork + metadata uploaded to Arweave.
- The chip is written with the bottle's
/v/[tag]URL and slipped into the cork. - Anyone taps the bottle with a phone → VERIFIED + wine, château, vintage, volume, alcohol %, serial + a live Solscan link.
- A copied chip is caught and named. The chip stamps a tap counter into the URL, and a counter only ever goes up — so one already seen means two chips are answering for the same bottle. The scan returns COPY DETECTED with the evidence (counter presented vs. highest already seen), and the estate gets an alert. A tag whose AES cryptogram fails its key returns INVALID TAG.
- The customer claims it to their wallet ("My Cellar"); the NFT is transferred on-chain. Burning (transfer to the burn address) retires the passport forever.
The cryptographic core (app/src/lib/sun.mjs) implements AES-128-CMAC (RFC 4493)
and the NTAG 424 DNA SUN per NXP AN12196, unit-tested against the RFC vectors. The
verdict logic (app/src/lib/verify-rules.mjs) is unit-tested across every counter
pair, both on the clear-text mirror and the sealed cryptogram path.
Run it: cd app && docker compose up --build → http://localhost:3000
(details in app/README.md).
- ✅ Study complete — market validated, figures sourced and verified
(
study/15-counterfeit-data-verified.md). - ✅ MVP working — real NFC + real Solana NFTs, copy/clone detection with estate alerts, admin dashboard, My Cellar.
- ⏭ Next — field validation (interviews with target brands), then a paid wine pilot. Full platform (fraud map, DPP module, billing, trade escrow) is post-pilot.
All headline figures are sourced and deliberately conservative; unsupported claims
(e.g. "~20% of wine is fake") have been retired. See
study/15-counterfeit-data-verified.md
for the corrected, defensible number set used across the study and the pitch.