Tell me with whom you associate, and I will tell you who you are. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The luxury watch industry depends a great deal upon credibility. Arguably, belief in superior quality is the top reason people are willing to hand over four-, five-, or six-figure sums of money to buy a watch. If the watch-buying public starts to doubt a brand’s quality claims due to a loss of credibility, the brand’s future is in serious question.

For these reasons, I’ve watched with some trepidation as various watch brands have started to enter the cryptocurrency / blockchain / non-fungible token (NFT) world. This space is highly specialized in skills that are not typically associated with traditional watchmaking. A lathe isn’t much use when you’re trying to evaluate a particular public key encryption standard, for example (and vice versa). For this reason, horology’s entre to the crypto space almost always involves a partnership with another person or organization already active in that space.

And this is where the industry exposes itself to risk.

Trustworthiness of the cryptocurrency and NFT community

There is rampant fraud and scheming in the cryptocurrency and NFT community. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur with an estimated net worth of $24 billion explained an emerging cryptocurrency fad called “yield farming.” The interviewer concluded that this was…