In November, Swiss Post plans to issue a Swiss Crypto Stamp. It will have a physical version that can be used in the conventional way to frank postal items. But each stamp comes with a QR code that links to a digital twin as a blockchain collectible.
While the physical stamp has a single design, the digital stamp could be one of 13 different designs, and customers won’t know which one in advance. To spice things up, the designs differ by rarity. Some have 65,000 digital copies, while others have only 50.
We note that the term non-fungible token (NFT) was not used. The reason was to avoid putting off non-technical people with jargon. A spokesperson confirmed they are NFTs on Polygon, the Layer 2 Ethereum network.
Swiss Post isn’t the first government organization to issue a blockchain digital collectible. While it’s appealing to stamp collectors, Lithuania’s central bank targeted coin collectors by issuing 24,000 blockchain-based collectible LBCoins. In June last year, NFTs were still very much a niche pastime compared to today, and even less so in 2019 when the concept was first floated.
Meanwhile, the Swiss postal service is no slouch when it comes to blockchain. Back in 2018, it collaborated with Swisscom to create a Swiss national blockchain infrastructure known as the Swiss Trust Chain. This is the platform that supports Hyperledger Fabric.
