SECOO and Ultrain to build the Global Luxury Consumption Alliance

BEIJING, Dec. 11, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- SECOO Group (NASDAQ: SECO) and Ultrain successfully held "The Global Luxury Consumption Alliance" Launch Press Conference jointly today. It is a critical strategic cooperation between the two organizations to seriously bring the luxury goods authentication and transaction model to the next level, adopting AI and blockchain as the innovative technology infrastructure. The "Global Luxury Consumption Alliance Chain" is an alliance to welcome all important luxury industry stakeholders, including brands, designers, online and offline retail channels, regulators and customs, and all the way to the end users together to best operate the logistics and authenticity issues, to lower the cost of trust among all parties and to bring the highest efficiency of transaction and satisfaction for the end consumer. This major initiative shows how much SECOO cares about high-tech enabled innovation to push the boundaries of business models and to not only serve its own businesses, but also to bring benefits to the entire luxury consumption industry globally.

According to McKinsey's "2019 China Luxury Consumption Report", in 2018, Chinese luxury consumption at home and abroad reached close to 120 billion USD, which is one-third of global luxury consumption. Online sales are projected to increase by two to three times from the current scale by 2025. Nonetheless, anti-counterfeiting traceability is still a major pain point of the global luxury industry when it comes to endless "cheap copy" and "high imitation". Public Blockchain technology with its truly decentralized, tamper-proof traceability with extremely customizable application logic on the chain has provided a solution. The characteristics of its technology offer a new dimension to luxury identification and quality guarantee.

In June 2018, SECOO already launched its first version and the industry's first luxury blockchain application for commercial use. Every product on the chain has a unique ID attached to the physical good. By using the SECOO App, users can scan the code to query the anti-counterfeit traceability information of the products.

In April 2019, SECOO continued to increase the authenticity R&D effort and jointly established the "SECOO AI Laboratory" with the Academy of Sciences Computing Institute. As Secoo already owns the largest identification center with high quality big data in Asia, the AI-Model-Driven identification of products can be realized and users are provided with a faster, safer and more reliable identification method that brings reliable results.

The cooperation between Secoo and Ultrain is an example of the long term dedication of Secoo into R&D and innovation.

Led by SECOO and many other crucial partners from the industry, the "Global Luxury Consumption Alliance" currently provides traceability information on chain with privacy protections built-in. Through today's partnership with Ultrain, SECOO Blockchain will obtain three major core tech competencies which excel globally to achieve its goals, they are "VDF-based R-PoS consensus algorithm", "random dynamic sharing technology", and "programmable zero-knowledge proof on chain". With these core know-hows, the GLCA will completely solve the core pain points of low TPS, high cost, and lack of privacy protection in the commercial implementation of blockchain technology. A high-performance, low-cost, high-security blockchain service platform is formed today for the luxury industry. The GLCA will continue to invite more upstream and downstream players to join, to contribute to a better identification alliance and transaction efficiencies to all luxury goods consumers.

Experts have pointed out that, in the future, blockchain alliance competition will not only be based on the improvement of the underlying technology, but also the benefits of the distribution mechanism of the alliance and long-term fairness issues. Referring to Libra, launched by Facebook, its alliance association-like governance and public-oriented architecture have shown the embryonic characteristics of the public alliance chain.

Ultrain co-founder & CEO Ray Guo commented, "based on Ultrain's block-chain technology, the "Global Luxury Consumption Alliance" has massive decentralized nodes capabilities, on-chain data privacy protection capabilities, and high concurrency and tamper-resistant computing capabilities, which provides a solid foundation for the construction of this alliances". Emma Liao, Co-founder of Ultrain mentioned: "blockchain/trust computing technology has great value in the luxury industry. Transparency and synchronized operation can optimize the industry's value chain in many ways, new way of engagement and incentive methods are implemented, which result with utmost convenience and benefits to all end users. I hope our cooperation with SECOO will make a significant impact and valuable contribution to the global luxury consumption field. "

Zhonghui Lei, Vice President of SECOO stated, "The strategic cooperation with Ultrain is a crucial step of our innovation upgrade." "SECOO will also invite more partners to build this alliance with multiple professional services for the luxury industry. We believe that on boarding C2C second-hand trading platforms empowered by it has a great merit and high-end consumer communication, customer loyalty programs among all other services."

Ultrain is a world-leading public blockchain optimized for commercial use. It aims to build a general purpose blockchain offering general purposed public blockchain services to all industries. As one of the most innovative projects in the field, Ultrain holds 12 patents in blockchain technology. Leveraging its powerful R&D capabilities and global business network, it commits to construct a robust blockchain ecosystem that empowers a wide range of industries.

SOURCE Secoo Group