Our journey as a company begins with our childhood hobby of collecting cards. The days of opening up packs, or bags of chips just to get something new, something shiny to add to our collection or decks is still in our memories. Our hobby grew into a passion which is now an extension of ourselves. We love our collection, we show it off with pride. Every collector has a similar story.

However, over time we began to notice a dark truth about the collecting hobby. Fakes. Especially when it comes to items of value such as autographed memorabilia. It is such a big problem that in fact some companies estimate there are more fake items than there are originals.

As a collector, investor or artist this is a problem that affects us all. When the fakes outnumber the originals in any market, it is hard to know if you are filling up your collection with fake or authentic items. Collectors are forced to pay extra, sometimes to multiple different parties just to determine if an item is real or not. The fakes also end up hurting the value of the original item in the process as they all compete to sell for a cheaper price. 

What if there was a way we could find out if an item we want to purchase is authentic? What if as collectors we didn't have to pay a third-party company to determine if an item is authentic or not, for every purchase? What if it was easy to see the entire history of an item, how many times it was traded and who owned it?

As two engineers, we created CertSeal and we set out to solve this issue and make it harder for bad actors to produce fraudulent items in the future.