SUKU, a blockchain startup that tracks luxury goods among other things, is shifting its high-end sneaker authentication system to Hedera Hashgraph after fees for Ethereum got too high.
The first SUKU application migrated to Hedera is called INFINITE and it uses non-fungible tokens (NFTs), unique digital watermarks, to authenticate and enable simple secondary trading in limited edition kicks that tend to command prices of $ 2,000 and more.
The sneaker authentication app has a physical NFT tag in the shoe, combined with the non-forged identity token. (It’s not the first time rare and valuable sneakers have been crossed with NFTs.) The cost of creating an NFT on Ethereum at current gas prices is over $ 80, as opposed to $ 1 for minting a one-time token on Hedera said Yonathan Lapchik, CEO of Citizens Reserve, the inventor of SUKU.
“Don’t get me wrong, we love Ethereum,” said Lapchik. “But now we’re getting a lot of users of the app and we have to keep these fees as low as possible, and it really wasn’t possible to scale on Ethereum.”
According to Lapchik, the INFINITE app will now be integrated with three sneaker authentication platforms, including StockX, the legendary secondary sneaker marketplace. The secondary market for rare sneakers is well established, but the digital titles that accompany luxury watches, for example, are missing.
“We’re really looking at the problem of tags that authenticate sneakers that really don’t work these days,” Lapchik said. “If you have a pair of trainers and want to resell them to the platform you got them from or to someone else, you will need to re-authenticate them. What we have built is valuable for secondary markets, but also for brands. “
The SUKU blockchain journey began about three and a half years ago with a mix of quorum, the privacy-driven fork of Ethereum designed by JPMorgan, and the public chain. SUKU continues to be enterprise-focused (its OMNI platform also does track and trace for the supply chain), so Hedera is well suited for the company’s needs, Lapchik said.
Under the hood, Hedera uses a variant of distributed ledger technology that can handle a very high volume of transactions, but is not a real blockchain. The network is managed by the Hedera Governing Council, which includes companies like Google, IBM, and LG that run nodes.
SUKU is an important part of the migration and will be the first to use Hedera’s token service in a manner similar to the non-fungible ERC-721 token standard for Ethereum, Lapchik said.
“We took the same foundation as we did with ERC-721 and brought that to Hedera Token Service NFTs,” he said.
