With over 30 percent of China’s wine imports coming through Direct Imported Goods Sales Centre LTD (DIG), the partnership between Vechain and DIG couldn’t have come at a better time.

The move for Vechain to work with a leading product distributor such as DIG will not only mean growth in the profits for holders of VEN token but it will also help advance the utility of Blockchain globally. Needless to say, this is one of the most interesting partnerships that is set to bring about more development in the Blockchain space so far.

DIG is a wholly owned Shanghai Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone Development subsidiary (government owned) and hopes to eventually become one of China’s biggest distribution channels for imported physical items.

Let’s get into more detail on what the partnership actually entails.

Description of the partnership

With this newfound partnership, Vechain will be tasked to authenticate and trace winery data from the producers, through the supply chain and eventually to the consumer using smart NFC chips in the wine bottles. How will Vechain achieve this? Well, will the integration of Blockchain into the logistics and data collecting framework, Vechain will design chips on each wine bottles with specific public keys that are identifiable on the network.

With the opening of each bottle, the labels and tags will be broken and hence an immutable record of opened bottles will be established to prevent reuse. By this fact, Vechain and DIG will be at the forefront of solving the global problem of counterfeit wine that is currently ruining brands in this multi-billion dollar industry.

An estimated 30,000 counterfeit wine bottles are reportedly sold every hour in China. For instance, over 1000 bottles of fake Chateau Lafite wine were sold at an auction for an estimated value of over $150,000.

These incidences (among many others) demonstrate just how widespread and useful Vechain’s Blockchain solution can turn out to be if implemented through this partnership with DIG.

How is this partnership useful to Vechain?

To begin with, DIG boasts of about 30 percent control of the entire wine importation market in China with plans to grow into other products as well.

To put that in perspective, compared to the UK and the USA, China was the fourth biggest import market right after German in 2016 with over 94 million wine cases expected to be imported in the next five years. If China manages to achieve this, it will beat USA’s 85.76 million and be the third largest wine import market.

This, therefore, means that DIG’s 30 percent share of China’s wine imports has a potential of achieving a whopping 1.2 billion 70cl bottles by 2021. With the partnership with Vechain, each of the bottles that go through DIG will have an NFC smart chip for authentication giving Vechain a whole new level of significance in the Chinese wine importation market.

Status of the partnership so far

Currently, there are over one million fine wine bottles on Vechain’s platform from D.I.G.

Vechain is set to build a platform that DIG will use to trace liquor from overseas winery to China and eventually to the end consumer. The product data will be recorded onto the smart chip attached to each of the wine bottles and then recorded on Vechain’s distributed ledger.

The information to be included in the ledger will be the sales and logistics data as well as the complete lifecycle of the product straight from the manufacturer to the end consumer. This will greatly help consumers differentiate between legitimate and counterfeit wine and also prevent reuse of wine whose seal has been broken.

Conclusion

With more partnerships such as the one with DIG, Vechain will soon achieve global market transparency through the use of Blockchain technology.

In the wine importation industry, consumers will soon have access to detailed information on their purchases and get a complete view of the supply chain. This will not only help Vechain grow in the long run but also businesses such as DIG that work with Blockchain experts are set to solidify their brand and grow in the long run.