Trace Crystal is developing a new generation of material-based authentication technologies designed to combat counterfeiting and strengthen trust across critical supply chains. By building secure authentication protocols on top of a material that leverages the unique optical properties of liquid crystal structures, the company creates unclonable physical tags that enable secure product verification at the material level, with initial applications focused on the pharmaceutical industry and other high-value sectors. 

What specific industrial or scientific applications do your crystals enable today that standard materials cannot address?

Our CaeSaR tags act as a physical trust anchor embedded directly into products. Unlike standard labels or digital identifiers, they carry a unique, unclonable signature at the material level, one that emerges naturally during fabrication and cannot be reproduced or transferred. Together with the digital platform and authentication protocols,  weenable secure authentication, traceability, and detection of anti-counterfeiting in ways that printed codes or electronic tags fundamentally cannot achieve. The most immediate application currently under research is pharmaceutical supply chains, where verifying the authenticity of a product through its intrinsic physical properties adds a layer of trust that no surface-applied identifier can match.

How does your crystal growth or processing method represent a technological breakthrough?

The breakthrough lies in how uniqueness is generated. A CaeSaR tag is composed of individual microscopic spheres called Cholesteric Spherical Reflectors, or CSRs. The optical properties of each CSR (its colour and whether it reflects visible light, UV or infrared light) are determined by the composition of the liquid crystal mixture used. Different mixtures can be combined within a single tag, opening up a rich design space for how a tag is read and verified. 

However, the ability to generate unique patterns also comes from an uncontrollable factor: the random spatial distribution of the CSRs when they are deposited across the tag surface (typically around 5 mm × 5 mm, though the size adapts to the application). No two tags will ever have the same pattern. Think of it in the same way as human fingerprints: ridge patterns arise from natural processes, they are unique to each individual, and the entire architecture of modern biometric authentication is built upon this physical randomness. CaeSaR tags apply the same principle at the product level. Each tag carries its own optical fingerprint, fixed at the moment of fabrication, which our authentication digital technology can reliably read and verify, bridging materials science and digital authentication in a way that no conventional surface-coding technique can replicate.

Which sectors are currently showing the strongest interest (space, defense, healthcare, energy, etc.)?

Pharmaceuticals represent our primary use case. Regulatory pressure in this sector is intense, and the consequences of counterfeit products are severe, making it an ideal environment in which to demonstrate the value of material-level authentication. Beyond healthcare, we are beginning to explore applications in defence and high-value industrial supply chains, where the need to verify origin and integrity is equally critical. Over time, any sector in which product trust is a competitive or regulatory requirement could become a potential domain for Trace Crystal.

What are the main challenges in scaling up to industrial production?

The central challenge lies in preserving what makes each CaeSaR tag valuable - its inherent uniqueness - while achieving the consistency and throughput required for industrial production. This involves optimising fabrication processes, integrating our technology into existing production lines without disruption, and maintaining cost efficiency at scale. Equally important is the read-out process: our identification workflows must be robust enough to perform reliably in real-world environments, not only under controlled laboratory conditions. Depending on the use case, this requires the development of both dedicated industrial readers and, over time, pathways toward consumer-grade verification.

In five years, where will your crystals concretely be found in everyday or critical products?

We envision CaeSaR tags becoming part of the authenticity infrastructure across several sectors: pharmaceuticals, high-value components, and industrial parts where verifying origin and integrity is a regulatory or safety requirement. In each of these domains, the underlying need is the same: replacing assumed trust with verifiable trust at the level of the physical object itself.

In pharmaceuticals, the near-term goal is integration into supply chains across regulated markets, enabling manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacists to verify product authenticity directly, rather than relying on packaging or intermediary documentation. Verification would work through a smartphone, using the same natural gesture as scanning a QR code, but with a level of assurance rooted in the material itself. In emerging markets and low-income countries, where connectivity is unreliable and counterfeit medicines cause significant harm, patients should be able to verify the medicine they are about to take with their own phone. That future is not only possible; it is necessary. Trust should not depend on where you live or whom you know. What it takes is not just an app, it requires integration at the manufacturing level, cooperation with pharmaceutical companies and regulators, and read-out solutions designed to function in low-connectivity environments. This is the system we are working toward.