Nuggets, a startup founded by CEO Alastair Johnson, is rolling out a blockchain-based biometric system designed to solve a growing problem in parcel delivery: how to confirm someone received a package
Nuggets, a startup founded by CEO Alastair Johnson, is rolling out a blockchain-based biometric system designed to solve a growing problem in parcel delivery: how to confirm someone received a package without a signature.
The coronavirus pandemic sent online shopping into overdrive, and with it came a flood of contactless deliveries. But couriers who skip signatures are opening the door to chargebacks. Merchants lose money when customers claim they never got their packages. The more signature-less deliveries pile up, the higher merchants' costs climb to offset fraud losses.
Johnson's company offers a different approach. Instead of asking a carrier to photograph the recipient or asking consumers to hand over personal details to a delivery company, Nuggets stores a biometric ID on the blockchain. When a courier arrives, the customer gets an alert on their phone and authorizes the delivery by providing their biometric data. The carrier gets proof of delivery without ever touching the customer's personal information.
"The economic drivers are all on the business side, namely chargebacks and failed deliveries. For the consumer, it is about privacy and data control," Johnson said.
The technical architecture relies on a process called hashing. Nuggets takes a customer's biometric information, hashes it, and stores it in IPFS, a decentralized storage network. The result is a zero-knowledge proof that only the customer can unlock. A compromised database becomes useless because the hashed data has no value without the customer's private key.
Nuggets doesn't charge consumers to use the platform. The business model targets carriers and other delivery companies with incentives to adopt the technology.
"We supply the line of code the courier needs to ping the consumer," Johnson explained.
As the pandemic reshapes how people live and shop, systems that eliminate contact points in ordinary transactions are gaining attention from both consumers and logistics companies.
