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.