How Genuino Applies Blockchain Technology in the Collectibles Industry

Introduction

The collectibles market has experienced an important modification with the e-commerce revolution, which moved the collectibles trade from shops to online platforms such as eBay (Heitner, 2016; Seideman, 2018). However, this shift implied a considerable increase of fakes. Among the technologies available to mitigate such risks, the blockchain technology is now emerging as a possible solution to these business issues. Among the full set of options and features, the blockchain enables firms to create non-fungible tokens, which turn out to be secure and unchangeable and whose uniqueness, originality, and ownership are guaranteed through the blockchain (Tapscott and Tapscott, 2016). Research has already documented the adoption of blockchain to mitigate the risks of counterfeiting items (Debayouty et al., 2021), which makes blockchain the ideal technology to solve this issue also for collectibles. In particular, two methods seem to be the most widespread today, whose application in the collectible and memorabilia industry is definitely feasible: 1) creating digital native collectibles on blockchain and 2) transposing physical objects into the blockchain by creating digital twins.

The option of creating digital native collectibles on blockchain has upfront advantages in the collectible and memorabilia industry. In fact, the blockchain protects related tokens, which are impossible to destroy, counterfeit, or replicate. Hence, users can engage in ownership and trade them easily (Rensing, 2021). Recently, Dapper Labs created and sold CriptoKitties, (https://www.ex-sports.io).