How Breitling Gave Every Watch a Blockchain Digital Passport
Here’s the case study at a glance:
Breitling, Swiss luxury watchmaker (founded 1884)
Luxury goods / watchmaking
Arianee protocol (digital passport / NFT), Dentsu Tracking (integration and digital warranty), Sourcemap (material-origin verification)
Public, Ethereum-based, via the Arianee protocol
Pilot on the Top Time line, March 2020; rolled out to all watches produced after 13 October 2020
First luxury watchmaker to issue blockchain passports across its entire collection; about 30% client adoption reported by Arianee
A luxury watch often outlives the person who bought it. It changes hands, crosses borders, gets serviced, and is resold or inherited. For most of watchmaking history, the proof that a watch was genuine and legitimately owned travelled with it on paper: a warranty card and a box that were easy to lose and simple to fake. In 2020, Breitling moved that proof somewhere far harder to forge.
The company began issuing a blockchain-backed Digital Passport with every new watch. It works as a verifiable digital twin that records the watch’s identity, certification, and ownership, and it stays with the watch for life.
Breitling was the first luxury watchmaker to roll this out across its entire collection, and the approach repays study for anyone whose business depends on proving that a record is authentic and has not been altered.
The Challenge: Paper Could Not Carry Proof of Provenance
Counterfeiting has long shadowed the luxury watch market. Fakes erode brand value and make buyers wary. This is doubly true on the fast-growing pre-owned market, where a watch can sell for a large sum with no brand-issued way to confirm it is real.
Paper documentation made the problem worse rather than better. Boxes and papers get lost, damaged, or separated from the watch, and they can be forged. A genuine watch without its papers loses value, while a convincing fake with convincing papers can pass.
There was a relationship problem too. Once a watch left the boutique, Breitling generally lost contact with it and its later owners, and with that, any chance to offer warranty, servicing, or resale support. Meanwhile, customers were quickly becoming more and more reluctant about handing over personal data.
Breitling needed a way to bind authenticity, certification, ownership, and service history to the watch itself: a record that could not be altered, could be passed cleanly from one owner to the next, and did not require the customer to surrender their identity.
The Solution: A Digital “Twin”, Secured on a Public Blockchain
Breitling built its answer on the Arianee protocol, integrated by Dentsu Tracking and connected to the brand’s digital warranty program. The result is a digital passport that lives on a public blockchain and travels with each watch.
Image source: Arianee’s Breitling case study
The Digital Passport
Every watch receives its own token on the Arianee protocol: a digital twin and certificate of authenticity recorded on a public, Ethereum-based blockchain. The passport holds the watch’s identity (its serial and reference numbers), its COSC chronometer certification, warranty status, and full history. Because the record sits on-chain, it cannot be edited, only transferred.
How owners claim it
A QR code on the electronic warranty card links the physical watch to its digital passport. Owners claim the passport into a wallet inside their Breitling account, in what Breitling describes as one scan and a couple of clicks. Watches made before 2020 can be registered manually in a Breitling account instead.
Privacy by design
The passport is not tied to the owner’s name or email; a wallet address is the only identifier attached to it. That lets Breitling keep a direct, ongoing relationship with the owner, covering repair tracking, warranty extension, theft and loss insurance, and even an in-app chat, while the customer stays anonymous.
Ownership transfer and resale
When a watch is sold or gifted, the owner transfers the certificate, and the new owner’s details are recorded in the passport. The new owner gains brand-issued proof that the watch is authentic and not stolen, which is precisely the assurance the secondary market had been missing.
Tracing the materials
Breitling also verifies the origin of its watches’ raw materials through Sourcemap, and works with Dentsu Tracking on supply-chain tracking. This extends traceability upstream of the sale, toward how each watch was made and from what.
The Results
Breitling became the first luxury watchmaker to extend blockchain digital passports across its entire collection, following a successful pilot on the Top Time line.
Arianee’s case study reports that around 30% of clients had claimed the passport, with adoption expected to rise as awareness grew. The service launched in 11 languages, which marked a global rollout rather than a single-market trial.
Strategically, the passport gave Breitling brand-issued authenticity infrastructure for the secondary market, replaced paper boxes and papers with a digital record, and set a benchmark that other luxury houses went on to follow. Vacheron Constantin had piloted blockchain earlier through Richemont, but Breitling was the first to commit across a full collection.
Key Takeaways
The clearest lesson is that traceability is not just a technicality or an anti-counterfeiting measure, but a relationship. Breitling’s passport quickly grew into a channel for warranty, repair, resale, and insurance across the life of the watch. The verifiable record is what holds that relationship together.
Moreover, verifiable provenance also unlocks value downstream. Breitling’s strongest payoff showed up in the resale market, which it had little control over until the passport gave it a trusted role there.
Adoption, in turn, followed from a privacy-preserving design. Tying identity to a wallet rather than a name lowered the barrier to claiming a passport, since people are more willing to adopt verification that does not expose their personal data.
The rollout itself was deliberately staged: pilot first, scale second. Top Time proved the model before Breitling committed the whole collection, which kept the risk low.
Underpinning everything, a record is only as trustworthy as its point of capture. The passport is credible because the data behind it, including certification, serial number, and materials, was captured accurately and bound to the object at the source, and that capture step is where most traceability projects succeed or fail.
How to Build Verifiable Records with VerusTrust Forms
Even if you’re not minting NFTs for luxury watches, the takeaways of this case study still likely apply to your own business as well.
Strip Breitling’s project back to its foundation, and you find something far more common: records, captured at the source, that have to be provably authentic and tamper-evident, whether they cover material origins, certifications, inspections, or chain of custody.
That foundation is what VerusTrust Forms is built for.
VerusTrust Forms is a data collection solution with optional blockchain verification. Your teams capture structured data wherever the work happens, and you can anchor a cryptographic fingerprint of each record to a public blockchain.
Simply put, a consumer passport like Breitling’s is the visible surface of a system like this. Forms is what handles what’s under the hood, which is the verifiable record itself.
VerusTrust Forms optionally anchors a cryptographic hash of each submission to a public blockchain, so anyone can later confirm that the record existed at a given moment and has not changed since. Your data stays encrypted on your VerusTrust Forms account and only the fingerprint goes on-chain, so you get tamper-evidence without publishing anything sensitive. That is the key difference from a public NFT passport.
Advanced GPS fields can capture geospatial data and geotag a submission using the device’s GPS, so a sourcing audit, sample, or inspection carries proof of where it was recorded. This is the same origin-verification role Breitling assigns to Sourcemap, applied to your own field records.
Teams capture records with no connectivity, in remote farms, factories, mines, or work sites, then sync once a connection returns. Anchoring can run on sync, so field conditions never weaken the integrity of the record.
VerusTrust Forms make it easy to control who can submit, edit, and approve records across a multi-party supply chain. This keeps the chain of custody clean when suppliers, inspectors, and managers all touch the same data.
VerusTrust Forms runs on Microsoft Azure, which offers enterprise-grade security, GDPR compliance, and data-residency options for the encrypted records straight out of the box
For the full picture of how on-chain anchoring works and where it helps, you can start with our in-depth guide to blockchain traceability.
Start Building Verifiable Blockchain Records with VerusTrust Forms
Breitling did not adopt blockchain for novelty. It adopted it to make a promise it could keep for the life of every watch. What the records say is “This is genuine, it is yours, and here is its full history.”
Any organisation that has to stand behind the authenticity of what it records can borrow that logic. The watch is luxury; the principle is universal.
Verifiable records, captured once at the source and impossible to alter afterward, are fast becoming the baseline in regulated and trust-dependent supply chains, and VerusTrust Forms is one way to put that baseline in the hands of the people doing the work.
You can start your own pilot run today.
Design a form, capture data in the field, and anchor each submission to a public blockchain so anyone can verify it later.
Blockchain verification is included on every VerusTrust Forms plan, including the affordable Starter tier.