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 Stellar network is an open source, distributed, and community owned network used to facilitate cross-asset transfers of value. Stellar aims to help facilitate cross-asset transfer of value at a fraction of a penny while aiming to be an open financial system that gives people of all income levels access to low-cost financial services. Stellar can handle exchanges between fiat-based currencies and between cryptocurrencies. Stellar.org, the organization that supports Stellar, is centralized like XRP and meant to handle cross platform transactions and micro transactions like XRP. However, unlike Ripple, Stellar.org is non-profit and their platform itself is open source and decentralized. Stellar was founded by Jed McCaleb in 2014. Jed McCaleb is also the founder of Mt. Gox and co-founder of Ripple, launched the network system Stellar with former lawyer Joyce Kim. Stellar is also a payment technology that aims to connect financial institutions and drastically reduce the cost and time required for cross-border transfers. In fact, both payment networks used the same protocol initially. Distributed Exchange Through the use of its intermediary currency Lumens (XLM), a user can send any currency that they own to anyone else in a different currency. For instance, if Joe wanted to send USD to Mary using her EUR, an offer is submitted to the distributed exchange selling USD for EUR. This submitted offer forms is known as an order book. The network will use the order book to find the best exchange rate for the transaction in-order to minimize the fee paid by a user. This multi-currency transaction is possible because of 'Anchors'. Anchors are trusted entities that hold people’s deposits and can issue credit. In essence, Anchors serves as the bridge between different currencies and the Stellar network. Lumens (XLM) Lumens are the native asset (digital currency) that exist on the Stellar network that helps to facilitate multi-currency transactions and prevent spams. For multi-currency transactions, XLM is the digital intermediary that allows for such a transaction to occur at a low cost. In-order to prevent DoS attacks (aka spams) that would inevitably occur on the Stellar network, a small fee of 0.00001 XLM is associated with every transaction that occurs on the network. This fee is small enough so it does not significantly affect the cost of transaction, but large enough so it dissuades bad actors from spamming the network. The collected fee is then redistributed and added to an inflation pool. This inflation pool releases Lumens at a rate of 1% each year.