PLOVDIV, Bulgaria—Cardano, the world’s #12 largest blockchain platform, celebrated its second birthday today, with the announcement of a new partnership, with the New Balance sports brand, and an ambitious vision for the future. Earlier this week, the platform also launched its network test net.
During the anniversary celebrations—which took place in socialist-era surroundings of the Agricultural University in Bulgaria’s second most populous city, Plovdiv—IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson announced that New Balance would now be using the Cardano blockchain to authenticate a premium line of training shoes for the company.
“It provides a lot of things to New Balance that they’re really struggling with,” Hoskinson told Decrypt. “Last year New Balance confiscated around 25 million pairs of fake shoes. Authentication is a very expensive proposition for a bunch of brands. What we can bring to the table is not only a very better way for them to accommodate this but also potentially create a marketplace.”
Last year, around $1.13 trillion was lost through counterfeiting, according to International Trademark Association figures.
Hoskinson envisages that Cardano will not only be used to help establish provenance; it can also help to identify factories that are cheating and producing goods on the side; create an effective secondary market for luxury goods, by authenticating produce, and even produce royalties or fees that go back to the original manufacturer.
“Rolex, Louis Vuitton, Gucci—if you work with these companies, you can dramatically reduce counterfeiting risk, create better supply chains and better markets for their goods,” said Hoskingson. “And, frankly, it can give them the ability to sell their goods at even higher prices—because they can have the authentic blockchain version of the bag, and they can mark it up considerably,” he added.
A Cardano spokesman told Decrypt that further information about the project was strictly under wraps until the official announcement, by New Balance in October. But there was plenty more happening in Plovdiv.
A tree planting ceremony formed the highlight of the anniversary celebrations, attended by the Cardano team, the wider community, and the general public.
Earlier this week, Cardano made the first decentralized step in its evolution towards Hoskinson’s vision of the “universality of finance,” with the launch of the “Shelley” network testnet, a sandbox in which ideas are tested before they are implemented on the mainet.
Currently, all nodes on the Cardano main net are controlled by the three companies who work on the project—the Cardano Foundation and EMURGO, as well as IOHK.