Systems and methods for compressing data, particularly for use in manufacturing and verifying certificates of authenticity (COA), are described herein. Data elements obtained from a COA are ordered based on an iterative selection process. First, one or more data ranges are defined. Having defined the ranges, a data element from within each of the ranges is selected. The selected data elements are then encoded. The encoding of each data element is based on a position of that data element within a range from which the data element was selected.