Breitling Brings Its Luxury Watches To Blockchain

This innovative move to use blockchain technology helps Breitling to empower its customers to know the history, traceability, and ownership of their watches. This traceability factor will also help track the service history and repairs made to watches, which is very important as the growth of the pre-owned luxury watch market is booming.

“When you want to buy a watch from a [luxury pre-owned watch] platform, a key element is the full traceability of the product you are going to buy, the full transparency about the history of the product. Today there is no system that is unifying those capabilities,” said Antonio Carriero, Breitling’s chief digital and technology officer.

Breitling has teamed up with Arianee, a track-and-trace blockchain solution that uses a system on Ethereum where NFTs are used to watermark an item such as a watch or even “authentify” a digital artwork.

Breitling's bigger vision is to bring the whole industry to create a global standard of digital certification and an API that will allow different companies to work together instead of on their own. Strangely however, even though using NFTs as digital certificates of authenticity is one of the growing use cases of blockchain among luxury brands, it’s one of the primary stated objectives of the Aura Blockchain Consortium which, among other intentions, was practically founded to create such a global standard. Breitling, however, is not one of the member companies of the consortium, which includes other watchmakers such as Hublot, Bulgari, and Chopard Geneve.