WISeKey and Jacob & Co join forces to NFT a Masterpiece - the Astronomia Sky – the epitome of 21st century haute horlogerie - Seite 2

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

Carlos Moreira, Founder and CEO of WISeKey said, “We are delighted to join forces between WISeKey and Jacob & Co. This combination of a powerful NFT technology offering with Jacob & Co watchmaking expertise in conducting Trusted NFTs auctions is a great model on how WISeKey’s unique Digital Identification NFT platform technology delivers the most secure and scalable blockchain backend for creating real digital twins for valuable objects. This unique approach will make it possible to mint provenance and a digital version into an NFT that contains smart contracts on how the digital twin may be used, removing any uncertainty of what an NFT actually means to a collector by delivering authenticated digital twins to the watch luxury market.”

Benjamin Arabov, CEO of Jacob & Co said, “For this new NFT Jacob & Co will be using WISeKey’s technology to authenticate the provenance of the physical watch including creating NFTs for each of the layers constituting this unprecedented concept and its entirely mechanical construction. The Astronomia has gone beyond impressive horological achievements and has been regarded as an outstanding multidisciplinary engineering achievement.”