Celebrating 20 Years of MOTION®

It was 20 years ago that the micro-optics technology behind MOTION® first made its appearance – first at the Optical Document Security conference that year in San Francisco, and then a few months later at the Currency Conference in Rome.

A year later, Crane Currency – already a thread manufacturer who had licenced the technology from its inventors (Nanoventions) – fully acquired the IP and unveiled its first commercial product, a security thread which it called MOTION. The following year, that thread made its debut in a circulating note – the Swedish 1,000 kronor.

MOTION was a game changing level 1 security feature. Hitherto, optically variable features had been limited to colour shift and diffraction but MOTION brought a third element to party – namely movement. It has, as a result, spawned a whole new generation of optically variable features for banknotes by the wider industry.

Currency News™ spoke to Crane Currency’s Eric Ziegler (VP of Global Markets, Product Growth and US Government) and Tod Niedeck (Marketing Director) about the background and foundations of MOTION, developments over the subsequent 20 years, and what the technology has meant both for company and for the security of banknotes more broadly.