How a Collective Brain Works

THE AURA BLOCKCHAIN CONSORTIUM HOW A COLLECTIVE BRAIN WORKS

Cartier, Richemont Group, LVMH, and Prada Group have created their own competence centre in the form of a non-profit organisation called Aura. Established on neutral ground, the joint service provider not only serves to develop new software solutions for digital certification, but also acts as a think tank and innovation platform for complex technologies and issues. It is a lighthouse project led by Daniela Ott that went live in 2021, after three years of development.

Text: Isabel Faiss. Photos: The Aura Blockchain Consortium

Under the motto “competitors collaborate for the greater good”, the Aura team, led by Daniela Ott, has set out to make blockchain technology more easily and widely accessible.

Blockchain is one of those terms that only

insiders fully understand. What exactly does Aura do?

Aura is a blockchain consortium founded by Cartier, Richemont Group, LVMH, and Prada Group as a non-profit association headquartered in Geneva. We operate like a software company that delivers blockchain-based solutions in the form of digital certificates and digital twins of analogue products. We also offer various applications for our brands to extract information more easily from the blockchain or integrate it into their own brand website.

How does Aura use this technology to improve the fashion industry and the world?

There are three specific aspects in which Aura really does make the world a better place. The most important is certainly sustainability, which we achieve through transparency and traceability from the raw material to the finished product. This places a very valuable tool in the hands of the consumer – it puts the focus on them. After all, the information about the entire supply chain is stored on the blockchain and brands can use it to offer services, even after the purchase. However, the blockchain has to be extremely easy to harness, which is something we work hard on every day. All the information we affix to a product as a tag via RFID codes, chips, Invisible Inc, or AI imaging provides a valuable foundation for areas such as recycling, counterfeit protection, and repair or maintenance. The second-hand market is very important to the luxury goods sector and blockchain provides security. Circular economy will also benefit enormously once the authenticity of a product, including its past, can be traced. Having a digital certificate of a product on your mobile phone will revolutionise the entire resale market. One can simply select the “sell” function to directly connect to corresponding marketplaces, which then incorporate all the product information automatically. That renders the entire process so much safer and simpler. We develop targeted solutions for all these topics in committees in cooperation with our clients.

As a technology hub, you have succeeded in doing something that seems impossible elsewhere: getting competitors to collaborate for the good of all – in the luxury segment, no less! What arguments made this possible?

All luxury brands face the same challenges. Our interface in the consortium not only makes newly developed digital solutions cheaper for everyone, but what is much more important is that the brands learn from each other. The greatest advantage of the non-profit structure is that we are not striving for maximum profit, but for the common goal of making new technologies as easily accessible as possible for everyone. If everyone were to run off and develop their own blockchain solutions, it would be inefficient and not set standards. Our slogan is “competitors collaborate for the greater good”. In our case, this applies to the planet and the consumer.

You plan to introduce an NFT marketplace solution in Spring 2022.

Unlike public blockchains like Bitcoin, we are privately run and have full transparency and discretion over who is allowed access to information stored on our proprietary blockchain. That makes it more sustainable and secure. We have already generated millions of NFTs every year as digital certificates, which are, in our case, always linked to a physical product. This means that they are not NFTs as one knows them from Crypto Punk and the speculatively driven art market. We are more interested in providing our brands with the technology to integrate NFTs into their product strategy in the long term as a purely digital product, or as a link between physical and a digital product. For some that will be in 10, 15, or 20 years, for others next year.

How much potential does NFT actually harbour?

The underlying idea simply makes sense. You purchase the NFT in an online shop and can wear it immediately on your “alter ego” in the Metaverse or place it in your digital wardrobe. The purchased item can, on order, be delivered in physical form after it was specially manufactured. I have noticed through my children how fluid the boundaries between real and digital have become. Digital assets do not only appeal to digital natives. This is not a topic reserved exclusively for gamers and collectors. NFTs as a tool for digital traceability and certification will not replace the physical product in a first step, but it introduces an enormous degree of professionalism and security to the luxury segment. The next step is to use NFTs as purely virtual assets, where creativity and the fun factor are no longer limited.

High-profile collaboration: Cartier, Richemont Group, LVMH, and Prada Group founded Aura as a shared non-profit centre of excellence.