WISeKey NFT Technology Helping Brands Mint their Luxury Watches on the Metaverse

The merger between NFTs and metaverse continues to take shape, attracting investors and creating new ways to own luxury assets.

WISeKey International Holding Ltd, a Swiss based cyber security, IoT, AI platform company, announced that it is supporting luxury brands’ efforts to NFT their watched as unique, digital assets, unalterably registered on a blockchain, that can be bought and sold like any other product or commodity.

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The technology also allows brands to acquire NFTs of digital representations of watches without the need to acquire the physical one as millennial consumer freely admit that they prefer a metaverse watch versus a physical mechanical watch. Strong demand for luxury metaverse is expected to grow. Morgan Stanley is predicting a virtual luxury goods market would be worth $50 billion by 2030.

This development comes a year after the successful launch of two world premieres on which WISeKey auctioned the NFT of the digital twin of a physical watch, the Hublot Bigger Bang All Black Tourbillon Chronograph Special Piece by Jean-Claude Biver, and simultaneously the Jacob & Co NFT a 3-D animation produced by the brand and inspired by its Epic SF24 travel watch with two added features to make it a bespoke digital creation, a tourbillon and a split-flap system displaying the names of 10 cryptocurrencies.

A WISeKey NFT is a unit of data on the blockchain, where each NFT represents a unique digital item, such as an artwork, audio, video, an item in video games or other forms of creative work. While digital files themselves are infinitely reproducible, NFTs representing them are traced on their underlying blockchains and provide buyers with proof of ownership.  Blockchains such as Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Flow, each have their own token standards to define their use of NFTs.

WISeKey, the first company in the world to use dual factor authentication combined with blockchain technology to secure luxury mechanical watches, that currently protects over 2.5 million luxury watches. Since 2010, WISeKey has collaborated with manufactures of luxury watches deploying this unique technology to integrate semiconductors tags powered with its VaultIC154 NFC secure element and provide brands with the ability of:

1. issuing a storage device comprising of a digital certificate of authenticity
2. checking, when required, the validity of the digital certificate of authenticity
3. modifying, when required, the status of validity of the digital certificate of authenticity.
4. Dematerialization and creation of a Digital Twin with its corresponded Non–Fungible Token

These tags, when placed on any product and tapped by an NFC phone, securely authenticate, and track the product much like an embedded ePassport and confirm the identity of the product on the blockchain ledger.

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Furthermore, WISeKey’s technology creates Watch Birth Certificates, digital identities which are analogous to birth certificates and can be converted into NFTs.  The Watch Birth Certificate is signed, or “certified” by a trusted authority and contains basic information such as date & time of manufacture (birth), company (parents), and type of product.  This digital identity, used throughout the watch lifetime, allows the watch to become a “Trusted Object” of the Internet, prove its identity and provide verifiable data.

The Watch Birth Certificate is based on a cryptographic public-private key pair that is unique to each IoT device.  The public key for this key pair is part of the certificate and can be freely distributed, while the private key is used whenever the IoT device needs to verify its identity or to sign data to ensure cryptographic integrity. It is the private key that represents the essence of the identity of the IoT device.