Say the words “non-fungible token” to a group of people and watch their eyes glaze over. But CruTrade CEO Devon Ferreira says NFTs aren’t nearly as complicated as we think. Eloise Feilden reports.
New fine wine platform CruTrade launched last week (7 October) to allow collectors to trade wine without moving the bottle.
The platform uses blockchain technology to ‘tokenise’ assets, meaning they can be traded and their ownership can change hands without the physical bottle ever moving.
Devon Ferreira, the new firm’s CEO, told db ahead of launch that his mission was to modernise the way we trade fine wine. “We think that in 2025 there are better ways to build and trade a collection that don’t require us to handle the bottle and therefore allow us to avoid putting the wine at risk,” he explained.
“It’s all about protecting the integrity of the wine and protecting the heritage in the producers that brought it to market.”
CruTrade uses Avalanche, a blockchain platform, to allow its collectors to trade wines, and has partnered with digital members’ club Crurated, giving its customers access to the club’s inventory.
Ferreira believes that technology is going to “simplify the supply chain”, and wants to stay ahead of the curve.
He criticised the industry for being slow on the uptake. “Wine is an 8,000-year-old industry, depending on which numbers you look at, but if you look at the systems, it operates like it’s still 1985,” he said.
Advanced technology will result in the removal of what Ferreira called “the intermediaries that, frankly, have have no right to be there, other than the fact that they had information about product”.
He said: “The supply chain is overly complex. Systems are poor and I think we owe it to the industry to modernise all those back end systems.”
With modernisation comes the need for education, and consumers and businesses alike will need to better understand the technology advancing the industry.
But Ferreira argued that the tech is less complicated than we think.
“Online shopping is pervasive at this point,” he said. “Even the luddites among us are very comfortable buying and selling things on the internet now. The last 10-20 years has taught us that.”
When it comes to NFTs – which represent a digital certificate of ownership of an asset traded on a blockchain – Ferreira said people are already using the technology without knowing it.
He explained: “When you when you really take away all the industry jargon, you recognise that people are very used to using a digital claim on an item that they purchased. We call those tickets, today.
“Nobody has a problem buying a movie ticket online and storing that in their phone. That ticket is really just a claim on an experience when they get to the destination.”
Wine NFTs work the same way; “They’re just buying a digital receipt of a physical good that’s being custodied,” Ferreira said.
He believes the trading tech is going to become the new normal. As for CruTrade’s ambition? He said: “We want to be a part of that.”
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