AMA Highlights: Arianee

By Daniel Dal Bello, Director.
March 22, 2021–8 min read.

On Friday 19 March, we welcomed Luc Jodet into the Hillrise Group Telegram chat for an AMA about Arianee and the next evolution in NFTs.

Arianee is bringing augmented digital identities to all valuable physical objects in the world, a step beyond NFTs popular now.

They are targeting the luxury goods market, augmenting the ownership of goods, facilitating the building and transmission of collections and placing ground-breaking features at owner's fingertips, all while maintaining their data privacy.

Arianee has formed strong relationships with 20+ renowned companies such as Richemont, Audemars Piguet, Mazars, and Dentsu Aegis to develop and trial Arianee’s solutions.

In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.

Daniel Dal Bello
Hi Luc, thank you for joining us today. First of all, congratulations on the conclusion of your recent raise, it’s impressive to see notable investors like Bpifrance participate. We’re curious to learn more about your collaborations with companies like Breitling and what you’re working on currently.

As always it would be great to start off with your personal background and an intro to Arianee.

Luc Jodet
Hi everyone! Thanks for having me today.

For my personal background… I am an entrepreneur at heart. Now, how I got into cryptocurrency is actually an interesting question. In 2014, I founded a renewable energy marketplace in Switzerland. An important aspect of this project was electricity traceability. By early 2016, I had started receiving calls asking if my platform was using blockchain. It was not. However, at that time blockchain for energy traceability was all the rage. When I first heard about blockchain or Bitcoin actually, in 2013, I did not catch the bug. I own some Bitcoin but it did not really strike me as something I could build value on.

The introduction of Ethereum in 2015 really changed that for me. I started looking into it but the catalyst was a series of inbound calls in 2016 for me to fall down the rabbit hole. After figuring out that energy traceability was not really a good application of blockchain I started looking for an application that made sense. Eighteen months later, I was co-founding Arianee.

Ray Reijnders
We’re no strangers to the NFT space here. However, Arianee appears to be taking its own twist on NFTs by offering a real-time customized interface and ‘digital passport’ capabilities. We’d like to find out more about that.

Luc Jodet
Arianee is the standard for product digital identity. We bring physical products in the digital realm and enable new features such as one-click insurance, instant resale, digital closet and anonymous clienteling. We are trying to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital world, which is a difficult task but one that has the most promises.

When it comes to what sets us apart it’s simple… traction.

We have already achieved product-market fit which was the key factor to conclude our recent fundraise. We already have brands such as Breitling, Ba&Sh and Vacheron which are deploying our products passport at scale and more brands are joining them in 2021.

Ray Reijnders
It’s impressive how much traction you’ve managed to gain, yes. Especially when considering that Arianee is still flying under the radar for a lot of people in the space!

I would be curious to know what you think about luxury brand conglomerate LVMH (amongst others, owner of Louis Vuitton) — which is also based in Paris similarly to Arianee — announced in 2019 to be developing its own blockchain project AURA, which would also use a trusted Ethereum-based network (quorum opposed to PoA network) to represent luxury goods in the blockchain.

How do you view their development and what is your competitive angle against them?

Luc Jodet
The announcement of project AURA was actually really good news for us. It confirmed that what we were building made sense and forced many of their competitors to take a closer look. This was a big factor in the decision of the Richemont conglomerate (Cartier, Van Cleef and Arpels, Montblanc, etc…) to join Arianee as well as Audemars Piguet, Breitling and many more.

This being said, AURA is still quite a black box to us and to everybody we talk to in the industry. Our approach is radically different. Everything we do is public. We think this is the right approach for an open blockchain project.

I should add that we are on good terms with LVMH as a group and with their brands. We talk often and we are open to collaboration.

Rowan Zwiers
Recently Arianee announced its 8 million Euro Seed raise, with notable investors such as the French Public Investment Bank (Bpifrance), all of which are exposed to equity but also your utility token ARIA20.

Could you tell us in more detail about their exposure and about the strategic importance of these investors in the long-term vision of Arianee?

Luc Jodet
The Arianee Protocol is an open-source & open access protocol deployed on Ethereum and a public Ethereum sidechain for lower gas fees. The protocol is open to anyone who wants to use it and we cannot change the deployed smart contracts. You do not need to talk to me to deploy an Arianee digital passport — just read the technical documentation and get a bit of ARIA20 to pay for the fees which are then redistributed to different stakeholders in the ecosystem, and you are all set!

Now you can see how while this is appealing for a developer or small brand, most of the brands we work with want a turn-key solution. We, therefore, created a SaaS platform where brands can generate Arianee certificates with a nice interface and where we manage ARIA20 purchases and expenditure as well as private key security.

The fundraise was a hybrid fundraise where the investors took a share in the SaaS platform and ARIA20 tokens from a private token sale managed by the non-profit consortium.

I should add that this was the first of its kind in France, and definitely the first time that the French Public Investment Bank bought into any utility tokens.

Rowan Zwiers
Arianee’s value proposition is already live and implemented by several luxury brands such as Richemont and Breitling, how will the seed raise be used to help Arianee grow to meet the market demand?

Luc Jodet
Now that we have product-market fit, it is all about growth and the fundraise enables us to accelerate that growth.

Most of the funds will go towards growing the number of brands using the protocol and improving the tech both for additional scalability and new features. For example, one-click insurance, smart closets, and metaverse integrations.

Daniel Dal Bello
In mid-2020, you posted a video about borrowing the ownership of a Tesla car from someone else, followed by unlocking the car with said certificate. I really loved the demo and it shows that there is a real use-case.

However, the process appeared rather lengthy. What is being done to streamline it? What could we expect in the future?

Luc Jodet
Well, the Tesla video was a functional demo we built to illustrate what a peer-to-peer certificate of ownership could do. We do not have a partnership with Tesla…yet.

When it comes to the process, I would challenge the idea that it was lengthy. We were showing first the lending of the passport from Alex to me. Then the actual act of opening the Tesla what the passport I had just received. All this was done in about 1 minute.

There is some processing time (about 4-8 seconds with 5-second blocks) as both of these actions require an interaction with the blockchain but that is the minor inconvenience that comes with having a truly decentralized P2P solution and processing times become shorter and shorter every day on Ethereum sidechains.

For faster speed, you can also put all that on a centralized database but it would not bring anything new to the table.

Ray Reijnders
You’ve recently talked about data privacy in your recent position paper. In it, you talk about how Arianee will allow people to control the use of their own personal data by others in the ecosystem. Given that the information will be broadly stored as publicly-viewable on Ethereum as ERC-721s (NFTs), what does this mean for participants?

Could you explain more about what information ERC-721s show and how users are protected here?

Luc Jodet
Our ERC-721 NFTs are a bit different as the details of the NFT (brand, model, etc) are encrypted with both the issuing brand and the owners’ private keys. This means that only the issuing brand or the owner can reveal the information stored in an NFT. This is essential for brands as one of their issues was that their annual production and sales could be estimated based on the number of certificates generated and transferred on-chain. Now you cannot identify the products at the macro-level, but an owner, if she wants to share the details of the NFT, can do it with a simple signature.

Now when we speak of privacy, the really important thing is the fact the NFT is owned in a wallet and that at no point the owner has to enter a login/password or any other personal information to take ownership of their digital passport. They only have a private key stored on their phone and backed up on their iCloud or Google cloud account.

This is important for both owners and brands. For instance, Breitling has used this feature to offer an anonymous clienteling solution through the Arianee certificate. If you sign with your wallet which owns a Breilting Arianee passport, you can talk to the customer representative about your product without ever having to share your personal information. It’s actually something that is asked more and more as privacy is being seen as a superior customer experience — a new form of luxury in some sort.

Ray Reijnders
So this means you basically have built-in customer support attached to the certificate, where the representative can also see your exact product?

Luc Jodet
The feature is off-chain, it is one of the services that can be built when you have a digital passport that proves ownership of a product.

Daniel Dal Bello
What are you most looking forward to over the next quarter for Arianee?

Luc Jodet
Being able to publicly announce the latest brands we just signed and closing the first partnership with a metaverse (we are really close).

Hillrise Group supports ambitious Web3 startups with early-stage venture capital and fundamental research.

Arianee is the digital passport platform for valuables — a step beyond NFTs, with a deep focus on the luxury goods market.

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