Seal is a blockchain powered product authentication and services platform which will provide consumers and manufacturers with product trust. Seal enables anyone the ability to confidently, quickly and economically verify the authenticity of any product which is Seal enabled. Seal is the best way for anyone to check if a product is genuine or fake. Seal combines NFC chips, which are embedded into physical products, the Seal app, and the Seal Network to provide a fast, simple, and secure way to provide products authenticity and other services. By facilitating a secure tokenized version of a physical product, Seal allows product-specific services to operate such as transferring ownership, theft prevention, insurance, but also brand activation campaigns and product analytics. Seal lets brands earn money every time their products change owners. For the first time in history, brands can earn money from items sold through the secondhand trade, while simultaneously protecting their markets from counterfeiters. Using the power of the blockchain, authenticity can be checked and ownership can be transferred decades from now, even if the product itself is discontinued, as long as people contribute to the decentralized Seal network. Seal Network is designed for adoption by brands. Its business model allows brands to charge fees for services. For the first time in history, brands can earn money from items sold through the secondhand trade, while simultaneously protecting their markets from counterfeiters. Every time products change hands, the brand earns a fee, turning their products into revenue streams. This offsets the costs of equipping the products with NFC-chips while providing a lucrative revenue stream where brand monetizes their authenticity. By using the power of the blockchain, authenticity can be checked and ownership can be transferred decades from now, even if the product itself is discontinued, as long as people contribute to the decentralized Seal network.
The Cosmos network consists of many independent, parallel blockchains, called zones, each powered by classical Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols like Tendermint (already used by platforms like ErisDB). Some zones act as hubs with respect to other zones, allowing many zones to interoperate through a shared hub. The architecture is a more general application of the Bitcoin sidechains concept, using classic BFT and Proof-of-Stake algorithms, instead of Proof-of-Work.Cosmos can interoperate with multiple other applications and cryptocurrencies, something other blockchains can’t do well. By creating a new zone, you can plug any blockchain system into the Cosmos hub and pass tokens back and forth between those zones, without the need for an intermediary. While the Cosmos Hub is a multi-asset distributed ledger, there is a special native token called the atom. Atoms have three use cases: as a spam-prevention mechanism, as staking tokens, and as a voting mechanism in governance. As a spam prevention mechanism, Atoms are used to pay fees. The fee may be proportional to the amount of computation required by the transaction, similar to Ethereum’s concept of “gas”. Fee distribution is done in-protocol and a protocol specification is described here. As staking tokens, Atoms can be “bonded” in order to earn block rewards. The economic security of the Cosmos Hub is a function of the amount of Atoms staked. The more Atoms that are collateralized, the more “skin” there is at stake and the higher the cost of attacking the network. Thus, the more Atoms there are bonded, the greater the economic security of the network. Atom holders may govern the Cosmos Hub by voting on proposals with their staked Atoms.