WiV Technology has selected EY to provide technology services to help develop its fine wine investment trading blockchain platform.
WiV’s global platform helps enable WiV’s growing list of specialist wine industry clients to conduct investment trades of bottles and cases of wine, with the origin, quality and value of an asset certified on a tamper-resistant, constantly updated global blockchain.
The WiV solution is designed to address one of the biggest hurdles in wine investments, the fear of counterfeiting and substitution, by having fine wines shipped directly from producers to a bonded warehouse, with full traceability. Once delivered into the warehouse, there will be a one-to-one linkage between cases in the bonded warehouse and blockchain tokens.
“WiV’s use of blockchain technology to make wine an investible asset is a big step forward for blockchain users. Their use case perfectly illustrates one of the key EY strategic beliefs: that getting tokenization right is the key to creating easily tradeable and investible assets. We believe that the success of WiV’s use case opens up a plethora of options resulting from tokenization of diverse assets to be traded on open blockchain platforms, while at the same time increasing transparency, simplicity and speed for all market participants," comments Lukáš Mikeska, EY Senior Manager and Coordinator of Blockchain Initiatives for the Czech Republic.
The blockchain components that EY teams have developed for WiV include a non-fungible ERC-721 token structure known as WiV Wine Asset Tokens. These will be deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. A smart contract tracks token ownership, provenance and transaction history and operates as a ready-made standard for everyone to use. Each case is allocated a token with a unique identifier and its properties are stored as detailed metadata.
With the wine secured in a bonded warehouse and fully tokenized, a broad range of financial services can be provided against those assets on the blockchain. Investors are expected to be able to trade, sell, transfer and even seek financing against their blockchain-based assets at a fraction of the cost and time required previously.
“Fine wine is a fully tradeable asset, and it is vitally important that provenance is protected, because provenance is the only way to prove a wine’s true value without actually opening the bottle. Currently, many wine trades often slow to a crawl because the extensive paper trails must be manually checked at every step of the process, massively reducing the potential size of the market. We are enhancing the ecosystem so that fine wine investments can be traded as quickly, easily and safely as books are online. We want to make fine wine an asset that people invest in with confidence,” Tommy Nordam Jensen, WiV Technology CEO and Founder.
