Fur Real? Businesses Test CryptoKitties-Inspired Ethereum Tech

According to French startup Arianee, which boasts former employees and advisors from luxury brands such as Tiffany's, Omega, Balenciaga and the Richemont group, the same technology can be used to help these firms create unique identities for bespoke handbags and expensive watches.

What Arianee did to test that theory was create a new blockchain - a copy of ethereum which combines both permissioned and permissionless elements through its use of a consensus mechanism it's calling "Proof-of-authority." It's permissionless in the sense that users who want to sell products to one another can interact with the blockchain, but the verifying of the ledger and issuance of new tokens is controlled by the participating businesses.

The crypto tokens running over the blockchain are based on ethereum's ERC-721 standard for non-fungible tokens.

Jodet could not talk openly at this stage about which brands might be running nodes on the Arianee blockchain, but pointed to the startup's advisors at Richemont - a Switzerland-based holding company that owns Cartier, Dunhill, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Montblanc, Purdey, Vacheron Constantin, and Van Cleef & Arpels - as logical candidates.

Commenting on the appropriation of these types of tokens for luxury goods tracking, Courtney Brock, co-founder and COO at Blockade Games, who's been an advocate for the use of ERC-721 tokens for multiple business verticals, said one of the benefits of this token type is that a single contract could work for all goods and include all the information for each product line, season, production number, etc.

"If you were to use an ERC-20 or just a regular blockchain, you would actually have to create a new protocol for each line, like if you wanted to distinguish between lines."

All blockchain technology needs a network effect and certainly one of Arianee's strengths is its heavyweight advisory board which could help create the adoption.

These watch passports pertain to three individual numbers: one on the case; another buried inside the watch; and a third issued by third party, Hallmark of Geneva, which would be a potential candidate to run a node on the Arianee blockchain should Vacheron Constantin decide to tokenize their products.

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