Building Blockchain, Crypto, and NFTs (S1:E29)

August 18, 2022

Building Blockchain, Crypto, and NFTs (S1:E29) We’re talking with Mark Manning, Founder and CEO of iTRACE Technologies, a Silicon Valley company specializing in supply chain security. Mark takes our listeners on a journey that breaks down blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFTs, making the technologies accessible to all.

Full Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01): You're listening to Humans in Tech. Our podcast explores today's most transformative technology and the trends of tomorrow, bringing together the brightest minds in and outside of our industry. We unpack what's new in physical access, identity verification, cybersecurity, and IoT ecosystems. We reach beyond the physical world, discuss our digital transformation as a species, and dive into the emerging phygital experience. Join us on our journey as we discover just how connected the future will be, and how we will fit into that picture. Your host is Leigh Dow, VP of Global Marketing at Identiv. Leigh Marshall Dow (00:43): Thanks for tuning in. I am super excited today, to be joined by Mark Manning, Founder and CEO of iTRACE Technologies, a Silicon Valley company specializing in supply chain security. We're going to be talking crypto and blockchain and NFTs, and get into some of those technologies. Then, also some of the misconceptions around those technologies. Mark has been involved in brand protection and product security for over 15 years. Mark, we really appreciate you taking the time to join us today. Mark Manning (01:11): Yeah. Thank you, Leigh for the invite. I appreciate it. It's good to be here. Leigh Marshall Dow (01:15): You know, we really can't turn on the TV or step into a Starbucks today, without hearing someone talking about blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFTs, all these seemingly brand-new technologies for a lot of people, but not everyone knows what they're talking about, Mark. Can you give our listeners just a high-level overview about each of these technologies starting with, perhaps blockchain? Mark Manning (01:36): Yeah, sure thing. The technologies are all related. Blockchain is an underlying, enabling technology. Think of that as the internet today, where the internet is an underlying, enabling technologies for things like email, internet banking, all of the travel websites and that kind of thing that people work with. Blockchain is an underlying technology that enables applications like cryptocurrency and NFT. Cryptocurrency on top of blockchain is like internet banking on top of the internet. That's the kind of layers that you're building up with blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFT. Cryptocurrency is, obviously a way of moving value between people. It has a digital wallet associated with it. In the case of Bitcoin, you can move financial transactions via a blockchain underlying technology using cryptocurrency. NFTs are related to that, in that they're a token that is being transacted over blockchain, but again, an application that's a level above the core blockchain technology. Leigh Marshall Dow (02:47): With both of those, NFTs and cryptocurrency, both built on the blockchain, what differentiates the two? Mark Manning (02:55): They are similar and related, but not used in the same way. Cryptocurrency is a way of storing and transacting value. The difference between a cryptocurrency token and a non-fungible token, an NFT is that a cryptocurrency token can be broken down into smaller pieces. You can have fractions of a Bitcoin or fractions of a cryptocurrency token. NFT, as a non-fungible token cannot be broken down or should not be broken down into smaller pieces. It is a token that represents something of itself, and that token is transacted as a single token. The main difference between the two is that you're transacting them over a blockchain, but one of them can be broken down into smaller pieces and the other is an individual token of its own. Leigh Marshall Dow (03:47): That's a great explanation, probably one of the clearest I've heard. Talking about blockchain and expanding that conversation a bit, how does it work, exactly? Mark Manning (04:00): Yeah. So the analogy for blockchain that I like to use is, certainly people who've been banking or had a bank account for a long time have used a checkbook. If you used a checkbook way back when, you would've had a checkbook ledger that came with that checkbook, where you wrote down all of the checks that you'd written to people, and you kept a running total of the amount that was in your bank account, in your checkbook ledger. This is before you had online banking, and you'd go in there and just look it up online, you had this checkbook ledger. The blockchain is a bit like having that same checkbook ledger, where you create an entry in your checkbook ledger. Its calculation is based upon all the previous transactions that you've had in that checkbook ledger. Now, if you made a mistake in your math, in the checkbook ledger two or three weeks ago, you would have to redo every single transaction in that ledger from that time you made the mistake, to make it correct. Now, blockchain is a similar technology to your checkbook ledger. It's a digital format, where it's going to record these transactions, and every transaction that's made is linked to the previous transaction. The math has to be correct in these transactions. Although, blockchain takes it a step further. Imagine you had your checkbook ledger and you were writing down every transaction in your checkbook ledger. Then every time you made a new transaction, you sent 100 copies of that checkbook ledger to 100 of your friends, so as they could also check your math and make sure that you had the calculations right, and there was no discrepancy between your checkbook ledger and the one you sent to your friends. Blockchain does the same thing. It's a distributed ledger in that same way, where anybody who's involved in that ledger can verify the math of the transactions that are occurring. What that does is it makes it very, very difficult for one individual to change any transaction and create a fraudulent or incorrect transaction in that ledger. Being able to create what is an immutable record, a record of transactions that cannot be changed without having everybody see the change that was made, or even have consensus that, they agree to that change being made. In simple terms, the blockchain is like a checkbook ledger that is being shared with many, many different people, so as everybody can view the transactions that are occurring, which is why it's such a good technology for a cryptocurrency, because in cryptocurrency, you do not want to have any fraud, and you want to enable people to see the transactions are true, and not fraudulent. This is why blockchain lends itself very, very well to an application like cryptocurrency. Leigh Marshall Dow (06:53): The transparency? Mark Manning (06:56): Correct, the transparency and the checking and ensuring that there is no fraud taking place, because you have many, many different people who are watching the transactions that are occurring, and ensuring those transactions are correct and agreed to. Leigh Marshall Dow (07:10): I really like your checkbook ledger analysis there. I think that you are crushing the visual representations that people can relate to. Although I'm sure, just like me, it probably drives you insane when you're in the grocery store and someone tries to write a check these days. Mark Manning (07:28): I'm getting to the point where I don't know if many people today, have a checkbook ledger. I still have one, but I'm sure there's a lot of folks out there that have never seen one. Leigh Marshall Dow (07:37): Yeah. No, I think that's a really great way to explain it. I think that, that transparency piece is really critical, right? It's a huge part of why people are so attracted to blockchain and cryptocurrency. Mark Manning (07:51): That's correct. That transparency is in fact, a double-edged sword for blockchain, in that there's a lot of people that were very excited about using blockchain in many, many different applications, but they didn't want that transparency. They didn't want to participate in a ledger where everybody else could see everything that their company or business was doing. Although on one side of the equation, blockchain is great because it is a transparent, shared ledger, and people can monitor and view what's going on. In many other applications, that's exactly what you don't want to have. Finding that balance between how much transparency is good for an application and how much transparency does a business want to give into its operations is part of the challenge, and some of the things that need to be figured out with blockchain. Leigh Marshall Dow (08:44): Do you feel like some of the crypto detractors, if you will, just are people who aren't ready to accept that, that's where we're going? Mark Manning (09:01): I don't know whether blockchain ... Let's take a step back. I think there's been a lot of applications that have been pushed out there for blockchain that, it isn't actually very suitable for. Leigh Marshall Dow (09:08): That makes sense. Mark Manning (09:11): I think one of the challenges with blockchain is that there's been an enormous amount of hype around how it can solve all of the world's problems. It is a very, very good technology for solving many different problems, but I think it's been pushed into applications that it might not be best suited for. I think that's part of the challenge between the hype and the detraction, is what is the correct balance? What is a good application for blockchain technology and what is not a good application for it, because as a database, it's actually a terrible database to work with. There's way better ways of storing information and retrieving information than a blockchain. Unfortunately, I think everybody wanted to jump on the bandwagon, and try and force it into applications where it didn't quite fit. Leigh Marshall Dow (10:00): Yeah. Well, for me as a marketer, I find blockchain and NFTs very exciting technologies for brands. Can you talk a little bit about how brands are using those technologies to, whether it's to improve a brand experience, to extend a brand experience, and all things that are exciting about these technologies with respect to brand building? Mark Manning (10:28): Yeah. For brands, I think there's a very bright future for blockchain out there with NFTs, but I think it's slightly different to what we're seeing today with the Bored Ape NFTs that people are using with their collectibles. I think collectibles will be around for a while. I can't imagine we're going to be spending $2.3 million on ape pictures in four or five years' time. Leigh Marshall Dow (10:54): Maybe though, maybe on Chanel or ... Mark Manning (11:01): You're absolutely right, but I think there are other applications where the NFT will evolve to become very, very important. I think you're pointing towards that with your Chanel analogy, in that if there is a way for a brand to connect a digital experience to a physical product using an NFT, I think there is a great application there for connecting people to their products. What we are seeing from an application perspective is, the provenance of products is becoming very, very important. Where did the product come from? When was it made? Who has handled that product? Who has even owned that product previously? Being- Leigh Marshall Dow (11:44): I didn't mean to interrupt you, but that's really fascinating to me because, as an example, and this is going to share with the world, some of my guilty indulgences, but a Hermès Birkin bag could cost $100,000. That is a perfect product for an NFT, but even more so, you see when famous people like a Kim Kardashian, on Kardashian Kloset goes to sell her $100,000 Birkin bag, well, that bag's probably even more valuable because of the ownership there. This bag used to be owned by one of the biggest celebrities in the world. An NFT would have that information. Mark Manning (12:26): Yeah. Exactly right. That NFT, now is containing all of the history and provenance of that physical item. That digital asset could be traded and sold independently to the physical item itself. There's probably value in that as well. The challenge with this kind of application, and this is why I've been in the brand protection space for 15 years, is how do you ensure that the physical item is connected to the digital asset securely? There's technologies out there that are evolving, to be able to do this today. Not all technologies are going to be suitable for this. Barcodes, QR codes and the things that we're seeing today as the digital asset connection are not secure enough, and not suitable for making that connection between a physical item and a digital ledger, but there are technologies out there that are doing that. Aside from the fashion accessory and the luxury goods, we are seeing this kind of application become important in industries like aerospace, where an aircraft part can be installed on four or five different aircraft over a lifespan of 15 to 20 years. How do you ensure that the information about the provenance of that aircraft part is related to the part that a person has in their hand? When you pull up to a gate or when you get on your plane to fly home from a conference and you hear the pilot come on and say, "Hey, we're going to be stuck here for another 30 minutes. We need to swap out a part." It's very, very likely that, that part is not brand new. That part is a used and refurbished part. Leigh Marshall Dow (14:13): Exactly. I worked in aerospace for seven years. Mark Manning (14:14): Yeah, so you're familiar. Leigh Marshall Dow (14:17): Yeah. Mark Manning (14:18): You're familiar with this. Now, the value of that used part on the marketplace, on the aerospace marketplace is going to be much, much greater if there is an accurate and full provenance of that aircraft part. Which aircraft it's been on? Which aircraft company it's been used with? When was it maintained? When was it refurbished? How many cycles has it been through? That information now adds value to that aircraft part, and that aircraft part will have more value in the marketplace. You have two parts in front of you, one has a full provenance history about it, and you know everything about that part. The other has been taken off of some plane in Africa. You may find that the part with the provenance is going to be of higher value to you. Leigh Marshall Dow (15:04): That's interesting because that kind of information is, as you can imagine, meticulously tracked for an aircraft engine, but not necessarily for every single component. Mark Manning (15:16): That's correct. It's meticulously tracked with paper today. Leigh Marshall Dow (15:20): Correct. Yeah. Exactly. Mark Manning (15:23): There has to be a better way than a paper hangtag wired onto a part. Right? Leigh Marshall Dow (15:29): Right. Mark Manning (15:30): That's where the NFT, and connecting the NFT to that physical item in a secure way is what we would like to call, the boring business application that is today being seen with a Bored Ape picture on the internet. The Bored Ape picture is the same application, but the value is different for a Bored Ape picture as it would be for a provenance of an aircraft part. Leigh Marshall Dow (15:57): Right. Well, the part that's interesting to me about bringing the industrial application to it, mentioning aerospace is that if you think about ... Because of some of my roles when I was working in aerospace, I would be on the distribution list for the incident reports. Whenever there's any kind of catastrophic error that happens in aviation, and almost always, it's a compounding error. It's not, one person made one mistake and this is what happened. It's, this maintenance technician used the wrong bolt, or perhaps the bolt was correct, but it was put in incorrectly and then something else happened and then something else happened, because most aircraft are triple redundant, at least commercial aircraft. Being able to track every single component, and like you said, the provenance of it, and the lifespan and history of it, and where it's been, and how it's been serviced in an electronic way? When you have an aircraft on ground, let's say here in Phoenix where I live, and you're trying to get that aircraft, maybe back to, let's say L.A., but all the information is on paper, on a hangtag in L.A. Just even having that information real time is so mission critical, literally. Mark Manning (17:14): Yeah. You know, the mobile app that we use to scan our secure token on the parts would help prevent some of those incidents that you talk about, where, when the technician scans the token on the part itself, not only does the app authenticate that part and validate its provenance, and bring up that provenance information, it also has a button to click, to go to more information about that part, which can contain installation instructions, maintenance instructions, cleaning instructions. Whatever other information that the technician or user may need about that individual part, above and beyond, is it genuine? Do we know its provenance, and here's the tracking history for it. Leigh Marshall Dow (17:59): Well, the other piece of that, that's really interesting is when you think about, in the factory, in the manufacturing environment, in aerospace, you have to check in and check out every single piece of equipment that you work with, the tools that you work with so that it's known that they were not left somewhere inside the aircraft or the engine or anything like that. Even tracking to that level could be done this way. Correct? Mark Manning (18:21): That's correct. Yeah, absolutely. Leigh Marshall Dow (18:24): Well, that's really interesting. You know, I didn't really know a lot about the industrial applications of NFTs. Mark Manning (18:30): Yeah. Again, it's all about the provenance and securely connecting the parts to its digital information. The NFT is just a token that's stored on a ledger. The important part is, how do you ensure that information relates to the part in your hand? Above and beyond ... Again, in the future, I think that people aren't going to even talk about blockchain and NFTs. They're going to be talking about the applications that are just using those technologies to enable a safer flying experience or an easier maintenance experience on an aircraft or anything else that they're using. Leigh Marshall Dow (19:05): Well, you are definitely in a very exciting and constantly evolving industry. What is iTRACE's role in blockchain technology? Mark Manning (19:17): Again, we are blockchain-agnostic. We use blockchain for where we think it's appropriate and where our customers would like to use it, but we also use traditional standard databases. Our role in the blockchain world is to connect, very, very securely, that physical item to its digital twin or its digital ledger components, the tokens. Our role is to provide that secure connection, to ensure that the product is authentic and genuine, and its provenance is known and guaranteed. That starts off at the factory where the product is made. Being able to secure the production environment and use blockchain or other technologies to record the birth of a component, or part, or assembly, or product and record that information in a secure way, again, either on a blockchain, digital ledger, or other database. We are that secure component, securing the physical world to its digital twin via blockchain or other database technologies. Leigh Marshall Dow (20:29): Can you explain digital twin for our listeners? I think a lot of people hear that phrase, but they don't really know what it means. Mark Manning (20:36): Yeah. Digital twin is very, very simply, an NFT that is related and directly connected to a physical item. I think you can almost use the two terms interchangeably. An NFT is a token that is secured or related to a physical item. That NFT can be described as its digital twin. Loosely, any data that is securely connected to a physical item would be the digital twin information about that physical item itself. Leigh Marshall Dow (21:12): Thank you. I know I hear that phrase quite a bit. I know, whenever I hear it mentioned, there's always people who get it and people, who it's never been explained to before. Mark Manning (21:24): For sure. For sure. Leigh Marshall Dow (21:26): What industries today, seem to be the most aggressive in really leveraging blockchain technology? Mark Manning (21:34): Yeah, so aerospace. We've done some work with Honeywell Aerospace. Leigh Marshall Dow (21:39): My old employer. Mark Manning (21:40): Yes. Specifically for their used parts marketplace. They've been very aggressive in their use of blockchain technology to provide parts provenance. That parts provenance is something that has become important to them as they have a multi-billion dollar used and refurbished aircraft parts business. Provenance of aircraft parts, obviously is important to them. The other one that we're working on actively right now is a joint venture between iTRACE and an organization called The Futurist Institute. The Futurist Institute does business analysis, and market and commodity analysis. They're a professional body that issues professional certifications. We are working with them to ensure the authenticity of their professional certifications. That involves making sure that the certificate that is issued to a person is not being reused or fraudulently used by somebody else. The way we are doing that with the joint venture is that we're able to record the issuance of that certificate or certification onto the blockchain. That certification is then registered to an individual whose identity can be confirmed. What that helps prevent is people claiming that they're a Futurist, a certified Futurist, and that would work for any kind of professional bodies. CPAs, doctors, dentists. Anyone that has a professional certification or even degrees, and that kind of thing. That allows people to be able to verify and validate those certifications with a simple mobile application that will scan the certification and authenticate it using a blockchain and a mobile app. Now, the reason a blockchain is important in this application is, kind of related to the fraudulent activities that occurred around the college entrance scams that were going on, where people were being paid to falsify qualifications and people's experiences. Being able to provide this kind of application to a university, to prevent somebody being paid to change someone's qualifications or certifications is why blockchain is very, very important in that application. Leigh Marshall Dow (24:09): Can you talk just a little bit about, getting back to transparency, why decentralization is important for blockchain? Mark Manning (24:24): Yeah. Again, decentralization allows many, many different people, who the majority of them are assumed to have good and honest intentions to monitor all of the activities that are occurring on a particular blockchain or ledger. It's also important from a decentralized perspective, to ensure that no single person has control over the data or transactions that are occurring on that ledger. That there is no single point of failure for any of the network that is being used. Again, that prevents organizations, entities, governments from, effectively preventing the activity from occurring on the blockchain because there is no single point where the blockchain can be disabled or prevented from transacting. That decentralized nature, it is, I think very, very important to the robust use cases that blockchain has, certainly in cryptocurrencies where no one person is able to have control over the entire cryptocurrency. Ensuring that these cryptocurrencies can continue functioning regardless of one organization or individual's intent. Leigh Marshall Dow (25:41): That's just so interesting to me, just how many different use cases and applications there are for using blockchain. Like you said earlier in the conversation that, it's really about doing some solid analysis on, is it right for the problem you're trying to solve or the industry segment that you're working in? Mark Manning (26:00): Yeah. I think that's the important piece of that. If people want to adopt blockchain or they're looking to adopt blockchain as the technology, is to understand the problem they're trying to solve. There's been a lot of commentary. I think that blockchain has been a solution looking for a problem. I think that needs to turn around. As people understand, "What is the particular problem that I want to solve? When is blockchain the right solution to do that with?" because in a number of cases, it may not be the best technology for the particular application. Whereas in other cases, I think it will enable applications that have not been possible, previously because of the availability of that distributed ledger and the transparency that comes along with that. Leigh Marshall Dow (26:52): As an industry leader, where do you see blockchain headed in the not so distant future? Mark Manning (26:57): Yeah. I have to agree with the folks at Honeywell when they ask the same question, in that we look at blockchain, today as a useful tool. I think in the future, it will be underlying many, many different applications, and nobody will even know it's there. It will be talked about like the electrical grid or the internet today, where it's expected to operate and function, and enable applications that people interact with at the layers above it. Blockchain, again, I think is an enabling technology to do some really cool and interesting things that people may not have even thought about today, but eventually it will descend into the background and just be that enabling technology that new, cool applications are running on. Leigh Marshall Dow (27:42): Well, it's so interesting that you brought up the Honeywell Aerospace example because you didn't know that I worked there for seven years. In my job there, I was responsible for building out Honeywell Aerospace's eCommerce environment. It's really exciting to see how they've moved from where I was, working there and building that initial platform, to using blockchain, particularly in the maintenance, repair and overhaul piece of their business. I find that just really interesting that, they've gone there. Then while you mentioned it earlier, I was looking at that part of their website. One of the things that they have listed there about building trust through blockchain is that interesting historical walled garden approach to data that's really prevalent across large enterprises. When I was working there, that was one of the things that was really difficult in building that initial platform, was connecting all the dots of the data, you know. Connecting all those data dots of the different systems, and getting them to speak to each other, and getting some commonality of platforms so that data was more transparent. Another example would be when I worked at Intel even further back, I was put on the e-Business team. That's what they called it then, when nobody knew what eCommerce and all that was. I was put on that team, and one of the reasons why they formed that team across, both selling and the supply chain is, they wanted to connect the supplier's supplier to the customer's customer. The reason for that is that they realized ... I think it was, maybe the third or fourth year after I started working there, we had a major recession. They realized that they had the data. A lot of that data, they would've seen it coming if they had known how to look at it, or if they had their systems connected in a different way, or those kinds of things. I like this idea of this historical walled garden approach to data, which is really, definitely prevalent across large enterprises even today. That this is the anti-opposite of how blockchain is used. Mark Manning (29:47): Yeah, exactly. I think that's when we get into the discussions of permissioned blockchain versus open blockchains, and who can participate in the various blockchains. I think that's where there's going to be a lot of very interesting applications come along as companies realize that, "Okay, now we can connect different blockchains together and just share information that we think should be shared between organizations." Being able to maintain that permissioned walled garden for particular applications. Leigh Marshall Dow (30:17): If companies or organizations want to take advantage of blockchain technology, how do you recommend they get started? Mark Manning (30:26): Yeah. Again, I think the important first step is to clearly understand the problem they're trying to solve. There's, again, many different ways that blockchain can help them. It may not be suitable for every application, but understanding that piece early on is going to be very, very important for organizations. Obviously, working with folks who have deployed blockchain applications and actually delivered blockchain solutions would probably be the next best piece of advice that I can give to them because there's a lot of hype and a lot of theory out there. I think that practice is probably harder to find than the hype and the theory. Ensuring that you have teams, partners, or organizations around that, have worked with these applications, understand the nuances of using blockchain in particular applications, and can help guide the discussion around, is this the right solution, and how should that solution work? Leigh Marshall Dow (31:20): What if I'm a student? What would I ... If I'm a student who's interested in crypto or blockchain or NFTs, what are some of the things that I should be considering studying? Mark Manning (31:31): Yeah. I think that's a great question. I would recommend doing exactly what I did about six years ago, which was go download or go get yourself a little computer and download a blockchain application and build a blockchain application for yourself, and see what's inside it. That, to me was the most valuable experience, because I was reading and hearing all about what blockchain could do and the wonderful things that it was going to solve for the world. It wasn't until I actually downloaded it, took a look under the hood and figured out, "Well, this isn't complicated. This does these particular things very well, and here's how we can build applications around it." That gave me the clearest understanding of how this thing would fit into the world and how people could use it for their benefit as opposed to the thousands of blockchain companies that were hyped up four or five years ago, and no longer exist. Leigh Marshall Dow (32:29): Right. They're the same as the dot-com bubble back in the day. Mark Manning (32:33): Exactly. If you look at the dot-com bubble, you think about companies like pets.com, they were ahead of their time. Those kind of eCommerce grocery delivery applications are commonplace and everybody uses them today. Back then with pets.com is like, "Oh, well, that's new." They just couldn't quite get the business model right, and the infrastructure wasn't necessarily there for them at the time, but that didn't mean it was a bad application. Leigh Marshall Dow (32:58): It's so funny that you just dropped a pets.com reference on me, because I actually just referenced that yesterday, to someone I was speaking with in our Santa Ana office, because I was talking about how, when all of that was happening, I was working at Intel in Silicon Valley. I remember being a bit jealous of all my friends who were becoming millionaires, and they would say, "But you work at Intel. That's so interesting." I'm like, "Yeah, it's interesting, but it's not the same kind of environment that you're living in. It's a manufacturing environment. There's a lot of process. It's very process-oriented. It's just not the same kind of ... We don't have a ping-pong table. Nobody's riding scooters and bikes around the campus, or that doesn't happen here." I remember being a little jealous of them and thinking, "You know, maybe I should go work for one of these companies." Then six months later, they were all broke and sleeping on my couch. Mark Manning (33:52): Yeah. The same thing has happened in the crypto world. You know, if you look at the guys who left Goldman Sachs for job offers in crypto currency companies that then got rescinded two weeks later. Leigh Marshall Dow (33:59): Yeah. Mark Manning (34:00): You see the same thing. Yeah, there's a lot of hype. There's a lot of people making a lot of money from a lot of scams. Eventually, it's going to collapse. Leigh Marshall Dow (34:07): Yeah. Well, this was just really fascinating. Like I said at the start, I was very excited to speak with you today because I had some fundamental knowledge of these technologies, but I think that you did a really beautiful job of breaking it down in ways that people who, maybe even aren't technology people can really wrap their head around and understand, and see how it fits into our everyday world. Mark Manning (34:30): I appreciate. Yeah. No. Thanks, again for inviting me onto the podcast. It's been great chatting with you. Leigh Marshall Dow (34:34): Of course. Thanks, Mark. Speaker 1 (34:35): Our new IP rated Contactless Smart Card Reader/Writer is perfect for clean rooms and industrial facilities. uTrust 3700 IG combines the world-class technology of uTrust 3700 F with a unique industrial-grade, dustproof, water-resistant enclosure crafted with polished high-grade plastics and ultrasonic welded seams. It stays clean inside and out. Learn more at identiv.com. 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