Would you buy a watch NFT? Your NWC writer would always choose to own a real watch, rather than a cartoon of a gorilla smoking a wristwatch shaped crack bowl, but there’s no denying that NFTs are all the rage right now.

Basically you buy a token online, that is encrypted, kinda like a DNA strand, then you trade it. Maybe. Or just watch it rise in value and transfer some crypto coin to Kazahkstan. Whatever.

You can buy NFTs as shares in works of art, music tracks, and probably unicorn dung. Anyways, if you love the whole gamble then why not invest in a digital twin of a classic watch – not the watch itself? Yeah sounds crazy, but it’s a kind of Warhol Campbells soup tins deal, where the same image is fragmenting around the internet universe, ready for collectors to snap one up.

Check out the blurb on watch related NFTs from Wisekey, who spell their name in a wacky way, mixing caps n lower case. So that’s cool.

Here’s the word;

WISeKey International Holding Ltd. (“WISeKey”) (SIX: WIHN, NASDAQ: WKEY), a leading global cybersecurity, AI, Blockchain and IoT company, today announced that it has finalized its NFT Marketplace WISe.ART and it is ready now to launch its TrustedNFT.IO service for luxury high-end and vintage watches.

This development comes nearly 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.

See New York Times article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/fashion/watches-nft-auction-jean-claude-biver.html.

WISeKey uses a unique patented method to secure the authenticity and provenance of watches through cutting-edge authentication microprocessors combined with identity blockchain technology, which together with on-the-ground measures ensures the authenticity of the watch and generates its correspondent digital twin.

WISeKey, was the first company in the world to use dual factor authentication combined with blockchain technology to secure luxury watches, and 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:

• issuing a storage device comprising of a digital certificate of authenticity
• checking, when required, the validity of the digital certificate of authenticity
• modifying, when required, the status of validity of the digital certificate of authenticity.

Dematerialization and creation of a Digital Twin with its corresponded NFT: 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. This technology has received a patent in the USA (see patent here).

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’s NFT technology creates a 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.