The OECD's latest assessment, "Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025," put the value of international trade in counterfeit and pirated goods at roughly $467 billion in 2021, about 2.3% of all world trade. The figure covers handbags and sneakers, but also auto parts, electronics, and medicines, and it is almost certainly an undercount because it captures goods stopped at borders, not the much larger volume that gets through. Behind a number that large sits a single, unglamorous problem: there is rarely a reliable way to prove where a thing came from and that it has not been tampered with since. This is the first article in a three part series on provenance for non-AI assets: what the problem looks like across industries, how a tamper-evident record actually differs from an ordinary database, and where a Bitcoin-anchored notary fits.
What Provenance Actually Means
Provenance is the documented history of an object or a file: who made it, when, and what happened to it on the way to you. Two related properties sit underneath it. Authenticity is the claim that an item is what it says it is and comes from who it says it comes from. Integrity is the narrower claim that a specific record or file has not been altered since a given moment. The art world has tracked provenance for centuries through paper trails and expert opinion. The problem is that paper can be forged, experts can be fooled, and the databases that replaced paper can be edited by whoever runs them. Provenance is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain of custody, and in most industries that link is a record that one party can change unilaterally.
The Supply Chain Case
Counterfeiting is the most visible failure. According to the OECD, clothing, footwear, and leather goods together made up about 62% of seized counterfeit goods, China was the origin of roughly 45% of reported seizures in 2021, and about 65% of seizures involved small parcels and mail rather than shipping containers, a shift that tracks the move to e-commerce. The damage is not only lost brand revenue. In categories like auto parts, cosmetics, and toys, a fake is a safety hazard.
Medicine is the starkest example. The World Health Organization estimates that roughly 1 in 10 medical products in low- and middle-income countries is substandard or falsified. A systematic review and meta-analysis put the overall prevalence at about 13.6%, rising to 19.1% for antimalarials and 12.4% for antibiotics. When a patient cannot verify that a pill is what the label claims, the consequences are measured in lives, not margins.
Brands and industries have responded with serialization and traceability programs. The Aura Blockchain Consortium, founded by LVMH, OTB, Prada Group, and Cartier's parent Richemont, issues a unique digital identity for each product and has passed 40 million encrypted items. De Beers launched its Tracr platform at scale in 2022 to record a diamond's journey from rough stone onward, with roughly a quarter of its products registered. These efforts point in the right direction. The open question, which the next article takes up, is whether the underlying record is one the operator can quietly rewrite, or one that anyone can independently check.
The Intellectual Property Case
The same gap appears wherever ownership of an idea is contested. Designers, photographers, researchers, and engineers routinely need to show that they created a particular file before someone else did. The folk remedy is the "poor man's copyright," mailing yourself a sealed copy of your work so the postmark proves the date. It does not work. The U.S. Copyright Office states plainly that there is no such provision in copyright law and that it is not a substitute for registration, and U.S. courts have consistently declined to treat a postmarked envelope as meaningful evidence. At best a postmark shows that something existed on a date. It does not establish authorship, originality, or copying, and a sealed envelope can be steamed open and resealed.
Formal copyright registration is stronger but slow, jurisdiction-bound, and ill-suited to the pace of modern creative and technical work, where a team may generate thousands of versioned files a week. What creators actually need between informal mail tricks and formal registration is a cheap, instant, independently verifiable way to fix a file's existence and contents at a point in time.
The Documents Case
Records are the third front. Contracts, certificates, inspection reports, audit logs, academic credentials, and chain-of-custody forms all carry weight only if a reader can trust that they have not been altered after the fact. In practice most of these live in databases or document stores controlled by one party. An administrator with sufficient access can change a timestamp, edit a field, or delete an entry, and a well-run system will not necessarily reveal that it happened. Diplomas are faked, inspection records are backdated, and "audit trails" are sometimes reconstructed rather than recorded. The reader is asked to trust the custodian, which is precisely the trust that provenance is supposed to remove.
One Problem Underneath Three Industries
Counterfeit goods, contested IP, and forged documents look like separate problems handled by separate departments. Structurally they are the same problem: a claim about origin or integrity that ultimately rests on trusting whoever holds the record. Paper certificates, brand portals, and operator databases all reduce to "take our word for it." That works until the custodian is careless, compromised, or dishonest, and the scale of counterfeiting and document fraud suggests it fails often.
The reason this matters now is that regulators are starting to require provenance by default rather than treat it as optional. The European Union's Digital Product Passport framework, which we return to in the third article, will oblige whole product categories to carry verifiable lifecycle records later this decade. Meeting that bar with a database that one company can edit invites the obvious question of why anyone should believe it.
The next article explains the mechanism that answers that question. It walks through what a cryptographic hash is, how an independent timestamp anchor turns a private file into a publicly checkable fact, and why a tamper-evident record is categorically different from an operator-controlled log, even when both contain the same data.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
Mintlayer Web Services provides Bitcoin-native infrastructure for issuing and notarizing assets so their origin and integrity can be verified at the base layer, not just asserted in a report. Learn more →
