IBM and Arianee, a leading NFT platform for luxury and fashion industries, announce their collaboration today to provide digital passports for collectible and valuable goods, enriched with blockchain-based provenance. IBM will also join the Arianee Project association as a member to contribute to shaping the future of Arianee protocole together with the other members. Founded in 2017, the Arianee association is developing, with its members, an open source standard for digital identification of valuable assets.
Over the last years, IBM has been delivering numerous blockchain-based solutions for improving the traceability of goods for Supply Chain in Food, Beauty, Textile, Luxury, Pharma, Logistics and Automotive industries, among others. IBM provides end-to-end visibility from ingredients or raw materials down to the finished products, and throughout the distribution value chains all the way to the consumers. IBM leadership in these areas includes globally adopted business platforms such as IBM Food Trust and TradeLens, and other industry and client specific initiatives that deliver operational efficiency in Supply Chains while improving the degree of consumer transparency when it comes to sourcing and provenance of finished goods.
Arianee’s mission is to transform the way individuals own and consume luxury and fashion, empowering brands and owners by giving digital life to physical products, experiences or communities through NFTs. In this context, NFTs can deliver proofs of authenticity and ownership unleashing a new form of digital-native engagement between brands and consumers: such a relationship starts when products are sold, but eventually continues throughout the entire life-cycle of the product and goes beyond the secondary market.
Together, IBM and Arianee have the ambition to combine their blockchain and business leadership in the luxury and fashion industries to offer the most complete solution for brands, linking Supply Chain visibility with brand-consumer engagement enabling greater transparency, data privacy and ultimately unlocking trust in circular economy. IBM will provide integration services to ensure interconnectivity between traceability platforms based on IBM Blockchain Platform, client ERP software and Arianee’s solution.
“Arianee’s vision of using NFTs to strengthen brands-consumers relationship is forward-thinking and perfectly extends our traceability focus, i.e. how the product was produced, distributed and ultimately came into consumer’s hands. If we frame it from a traceability angle, the relationship between brands – products – consumers tends to stop when the product is sold; however, in reality this is when the product comes to life. With Arianee, we intend to enable new digital passports that follow luxury and fashion products along their entire journeys, and we believe that this innovation will be beneficial both for our clients and their consumers. It is indeed an essential dimension of an augmented product strategy aiming at establishing new forms of digital relationships between brands and their clients.”Luca Comparini, EMEA Blockchain Leader at IBM.
This collaboration will also provide the opportunity to explore the interoperability between Arianee’s solution based on Ethereum technology and platforms delivered by IBM Services and running on IBM Blockchain Platform.
“We are delighted to welcome IBM, the world leader in blockchain-based traceability solutions within the Arianee Project association. We have the ambition to create strategic synergies, leveraging IBM’s expertise in enterprise blockchain. This collaboration is an opportunity to open Arianee to a wider ecosystem, and this will be beneficial also for the luxury brands that we already work with.”
Pierre Nicolas Hurstel, CEO & co-founder of Arianee
