The actual Breitling watch that James Bond was given as a gift in the 1965 movie “Thunderball” (it had a built-in Geiger counter) apparently sold for £ 25 ($ 33) in a car sale. The collectible was later auctioned off at Christie’s for a cool $ 160,000.
However, thanks to the long, unchangeable reach of the blockchain, such mysterious circumstances could never happen again to today’s Breitling watch.
Announced on Tuesday, Breitling will be the first luxury watchmaker to offer an Ethereum-based digital passport for all of its new timepieces. Provenance tracking was first introduced for a specific model earlier this year.
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Expensive watches have always come with physical (and now electronic) certificates of authenticity and international guarantees, but according to Antonio Carriero, Breitling’s Chief Digital and Technology, there needs to be a standardized way to transparently track service history and all repairs to the watch. Officer.
According to Carriero, this requirement is being driven in particular by the burgeoning market for used watches. In recent years, the used watch market has grown to about $ 20 billion, roughly half the size of the new luxury watch market.
“So if you want to buy a watch from a [luxury pre-owned watch] A key element of the platform is full traceability of the product you want to buy, full transparency on the history of the product, ”said Carriero. “Today there is no system that combines these skills.”
Breitling fittings Arianee
Breitling has chosen to work with the Arianee track-and-trace blockchain, which has ties to the Swiss luxury brand group Richemont, owner of Cartier, Dunhill, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Montblanc and others.
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Arianee’s protocol uses a system on Ethereum with so-called non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a way of watermarking a single object like an expensive watch or even giving individual authenticity to a digital work of art.
The story goes on
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Breitling wants the entire industry to work together, Carriero said, to create a global standard for digital certificates and an API that customers can benefit from, rather than working in silos.
“Everything Breitling has developed to integrate Arianee into its e-guarantee system is available to everyone free of charge,” he said.
Proof of authenticity is a novel and compelling use case for blockchain that differs from most enterprise applications of the technology, which are often about replacing an existing system. So it’s no wonder that Arianee is not alone when it comes to stamping provenance on luxury goods.
In March of last year, the luxury brand conglomerate LVMH, owner of the Louis Vuitton label, announced the introduction of a blockchain-based authenticity system (code name AURA). The project comprised ConsenSys and Microsoft Azure.
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As far as the progress at AURA is concerned, according to a ConsenSys spokesman, there is currently nothing to add.
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