Too often portrayed, wrongly, as a technology serving speculation, the NFT allows first and foremost to attach unique characteristics to assets, both physical and digital. Created in 2017, the French start-up Arianee understood this well by specializing in the issuance of digital passports for companies in the form of NFTs. “We use the NFT standard, mainly for the purpose of digital passports of objects. We target brands that create durable, insurable, resalable objects that are not necessarily owned by the people who bought them. specifies Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel, CEO of Arianeeat Capital during the BIG exhibition at Bpifrance.
These passports are used in particular for the purposes of traceabilityauthenticity, even guarantee, all use cases which allow a brand to maintain contact with its customer. “We create enriched customer accounts which are improved thanks to the functionalities of blockchain wallets, continues the CEO of Arianee. When the user connects, they have all the functionalities of a wallet, without the need for crypto or the slightest complexity and can retrieve their digital passport in the brand’s universe.
A single, open customer account
One of the main advantages of this type of solution lies in their ability to facilitate communications between different operators: “The user does not have to stay in a closed system, which will only evolve according to the brand’s new ideas; this is done in an open, natively interoperable system. The address of a wallet works in one universe or another. These tokens or NFTs are recognizable by all Web3 technologies., insists Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel. With a single address, the end user can therefore view several types of objects from different entities, and therefore navigate between several loyalty programs.
In the space of six years, Arianee’s different solutions (wallet and token issue) have attracted a wide range of customers, first in luxury, such as the Moncler, Vacherin Constantin of the Richemont group, Ba&sh, YSL brands. Beauty or Breitling, but also the Casino group with the design of the wallet for the Le Club Leader Price loyalty program.
More recently, the start-up announced a series of new partnerships, with an association with the watch manufacturer Panerai and Mugler for its handbags, the aim of which is to create digital passports allowing the provenance of these objects to be authenticated. , an undeniable added value, particularly in cases of resale on the secondary market. Further proof of the diversity of use cases offered by NFT support, Le Petit Marseillais has also linked up with Arianee as part of its new customer relations program “L’Académie des petits mousses” for the deployment of images unique certified collectibles in order to benefit from different advantages. “At the heart of our target, we have watchmaking because it is obvious, these are expensive objects, which can be resold and repaired. Today, we are very proud because we are leaders in this market with 10 of the 50 major watch brands, all of whose products will use our technology by the end of next year.details Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel, who therefore underlines the presence of the company in “fashion, luxury (…) wine and spiritsthe beauty” but also in the long term “car manufacturers, household appliances, all durable, resalable and repairable objects that deserve to be accompanied by a digital passport”.
If the company – which raised 20 million euros in spring 2022 – continues to form major partnerships on a mercantile level, it also contributes through a association of the same name to the development of Web3 technology, with a new version of its blockchain protocol announced this summer, which allows developers and third-party entities to easily create NFTs but also to benefit from interesting features, to say the least, such as messaging between wallets . Among its directors, the structure includes representatives of some of the start-up’s partner companies (YSL Beauty, Moncler, Breitlng, etc.) while it claims among its members entities such as IBM, the Wunderman Thompson agency, the metaverse platform The Sandbox or Vestiaire Collective. “A brand may have a little effort to put in at the beginning but they build something that is based primarily on open source (open code, Editor’s note)on open and resilient technologies, which constitute the Internet of tomorrow.”
