Arianee’s Key Focus for Big Brands? Building ‘a Better NFT’, Says CEO

Web3 infrastructure company Arianee is busy equipping brands like Lacoste and Panerai with the ability to create “a better NFT.”

“At the heart of what we do, lies a better NFT,” Arianee CEO, Pierre Nicolas Hurstel, told Decrypt at NFC Lisbon. “We’ve taken the standard of ERC-721 and we’ve super packed it with six smart contracts on top. Allowing anyone, any brand, any developer to create an NFT that is natively dynamic and CRM [Customer Relationship Management] ready.”

Arianee is a white-label solution that lets brands create NFTs without too much technical difficulty.

Dynamic NFTs can change over time as a result of a membership reward or a real-world event, for example. This “time stamping feature” can be accessed with “simple APIs” that are recognizable to both the Web2 and Web3 audience, said Hurstel.

Issuers can then directly message owners of their NFTs to inform them of news about the collection or an upcoming drop.

“For example, I have the Genius NFT from Moncler because I went to the Genius launch in London,” he told Decrypt. “Yesterday, I received in my wallet a notification with a token-gated link giving me access within 72 hours to the next drop of their Genius collection with Fragment.”

Dynamic NFTs open the door to issuers being able to interact with their collectors in a new way. Either through an evolving NFT or in-wallet notifications.

When it comes to Customer Relationship Management [CRM], Arianee gives functionality to NFT issuers that will allow users to hide information about their NFT. An example the Arianee CEO gave Decrypt was being able to hide that he owns an expensive physical watch—as this could be a security risk.

Giving the users the ability to hide the content of an NFT boosts privacy for users in an ultra-transparent space. Hurstel explained that CRM in Web3 could mean that companies will analyze people’s wallets before bombarding them with spam, emphasizing this would be even worse than Web2’s cookie system.

“We have a list of features like that, I could continue because it’s pretty rich. You could make your NFT non-transferrable and make it soulbound,” the Arianee CEO told Decrypt. “All of these features are natively integrated within this protocol.”

Soulbound is a unique, non-transferable variety of NFT that can also be used to share key credentials or other achievements linked to a person’s career.

Last year, Arianee minted 1.5 million NFTs and distributed them to more than 50 different brands, Hurstel claims. These NFTs ranged from digital passports to dynamic membership cards to digital collectibles.

“Really what we are looking at doing is onboarding the next million people,” Hurstel said. “Allowing hundreds of brands to distribute millions of NFTs as their new consumer engagement tool.”