Big Four Auditor EY Provides Blockchain Solution for New Wine Traceability Platform

Big Four audit firm Ernst & Young (EY) is providing its proprietary blockchain solution for a major new platform that helps consumers across Asia determine the quality, provenance and authenticity of imported European wines. The news was revealed in an official EY press release on May 23.

The e-commerce platform, dubbed Tattoo, has been developed for Blockchain Wine Pte. Ltd. using EY’s OpsChain blockchain solution, which launched in fall 2018. As reported, the solution is EY’s flagship blockchain product, enabling secure and private transactions to take place on the Ethereum (ETH) public network by using zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology.

According to the press release, Tattoo is an acronym for traceability, authenticity, transparency, trade, origin and opinion, and the offering has been developed with a focus on European wine consumer markets in China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Singapore.

The Tattoo Wine Platform counts the support of major Asian wine cellar The House of Roosevelt, which will reportedly implement the platform for its wine sales to hotels, restaurants, cafes and consumers. It further plans to leverage the platform’s support for smart contracts to enable customer-to-customer sales for investment-grade wine collectors.

As the press release outlines, the e-commerce solution developed by EY for Tattoo tackles wine provenance and quality for multiple entities — including producers, distributors, logistics providers and insurance operators — as well as creating a tokenized ecosystem for both logistics and sales purposes.

Tokens can thus reportedly be used “to buy and sell wine, schedule and track shipments, monitor warehousing and delivery, and arrange for and track insurance coverage of wine shipments.”

The Tattoo blockchain allows members of the ecosystem to track each batch of wine in order to monitor and verify its authenticity and handling by scanning a unique QR code, which provides data on vineyards, information on crop fertilizers and handling history.

EY notes that its solution for Tattoo uses an ERC-721 token standard as a model for supply chain management, order inventory and other processes, and that OpsChain’s asset traceability module has so far enabled the tokenization over 11 million bottles of wine for various clients. 

In April, EY launched a private beta test version of its new Smart Contract Analyzer tool for the public Ethereum network, as well as an updated version of its Blockchain Analyzer and a ZKP protocol.