WISeKey and Race for Water Foundation Announce at the Geneva Blockchain Congress an Innovative Identity Blockchain Solution to Reduce Pollution of the Oceans and Offset Plastic Footprint

WISeKey and Race for Water Foundation Announce at the Geneva Blockchain Congress an Innovative Identity Blockchain Solution to Reduce Pollution of the Oceans and Offset Plastic Footprint

Geneva, Switzerland / New York, USA - January 23, 2019 - WISeKey International Holding Ltd ("WISeKey"), (SIX: WIHN) a cybersecurity IoT platform company, today announced that in partnership with the Race for Water Foundation, a charity organization dedicated to water preservation, invites manufacturers and users of plastic products to participate in the "Race for Water Program" to reduce global pollution and offset plastic footprint.

Using its Identity Blockchain technology, WISeKey will generate a digital identity stored in WISeKey's Blockchain for each plastic product manufactured by participating companies and link it with a secure form-factor embedded on the product using QR codes, NFC microchips (using a new U.S. patent. No. 7,898,422 for an anti-counterfeiting NFC device) or UHF RFID technologies.  Upon purchase of a product equipped with an embedded form-factor, the customer, using the Race for Water App installed on their phone, has the ability to scan it and get information about the product and its ecological impact if not properly recycled.

Each product has a unique digital identity, and can generate a certain amount of Plastic Tokens, a cryptocurrency developed by WISeCoin AG, a Special Purpose Vehicle created by WISeKey. The amount of Plastic Tokens will be proportional to and indicative of the recycling efforts made over the life of the scanned plastic product.  Furthermore, Plastic Tokens represent a 'donation promise' to the Race for Water Foundation.

Once a product is equipped with an embedded form-factor, every transaction is digitally signed using WISeKey's Identity Blockchain and PKI technology, giving an accurate and immutable representation of the recycling efforts made by each and every participating company. These companies and their efforts to save/clean the environment will be entered into a master database managed by the Race for Water Foundation and will be ranked according to the volume of Plastic Tokens transactions generated by each one of them.

Additionally, Race for Water Foundation is cooperating with ETIA (Evaluation Technologique, Ingénierie et Applications), a French engineering group specialized in ecotechnologies, to process non-sorted plastic wastes and convert them into electricity. ETIA's Plastic to Electricity Pyrolysis Plants () can process between  5 and 12 tons of plastic waste daily and generate enough electricity to fulfill the needs of approximately 6000 families.



"WISeKey is intensively supporting activities related to the environmental protection during ocean related sports events (including sponsoring the 32^nd 33^th 34^th and 35^th America's Cup Americas) and new initiatives like the Race for Water Project. At WISeKey, we recognize the urgent need to clean up the oceans of plastic waste as the equivalent of one truckload of plastic is dumped into our oceans every minute.  We pledge to work with global and local organizations to raise the awareness, increase recycling efforts and reduce plastic pollution across the globe," said Carlos Moreira, Founder and CEO of WISeKey.

About Race for Water Foundation 



In 2010, Swiss entrepreneur Marco Simeoni created the Lausanne-based Race for Water Foundation and devotes every bit of his entrepreneurial fibre to the service of the oceans. Passionate about the sea, in 2015 he decided to launch a scientific and environmental expedition, the Race for Water Odyssey, to make the first global assessment of the plastic pollution of our oceans.  The findings are clear, "plastic islands" per se are not out there so collecting plastic waste at sea is not a realistic solution. The findings have shown that there is a "soup" of microplastics that drift at the mercy of the oceanic gyres. "We very quickly became aware that the solution was on land. It is absolutely vital that we prevent plastic waste from reaching the oceans", explains Marco Simeoni. On the 9^th of April 2017, Race for Water set sail around the world once more but this time on a five-year Odyssey, to offer solutions for preserving the oceans from plastic pollution, a genuine environmental disaster on a planetary scale.

About WISeKey

WISeKey (SIX Swiss Exchange: WIHN) is a leading global cybersecurity company currently deploying large scale digital identity ecosystems for people and objects using Blockchain, AI and IoT respecting the Human as the Fulcrum of the Internet. WISeKey Semiconductors secure the pervasive computing shaping today's Internet of Everything. WISeKey has an installed base of over 1 billion microchips in virtually all IoT sectors (connected cars, smart cities, drones, agricultural sensors, anti-counterfeiting, smart lighting, servers, computers, mobile phones, crypto tokens etc.).  WISeKey is uniquely positioned to be at the edge of IoT as our semiconductors secure a huge amount of Big Data that, when analyzed with Artificial Intelligence (AI), can help industrial applications to predict the failure of their equipment before it happens.

Our technology, trusted by the OISTE/WISeKey's Swiss based cryptographic Root of Trust ("RoT") provides secure authentication and identification, in both physical and virtual environments, for the Internet of Things, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence. The WISeKey RoT serves as a common trust anchor to ensure the integrity of online transactions among objects and between objects and people. For more information, visit .

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