Luxury watches & jewelry

A movement can be serviced, a case can be swapped, and paperwork can be forged. A bonded chip ties the record to the object itself, so a watch or a piece of jewelry arriving at a dealer or an auction house proves its own history in a tap.

Most watches are still authenticated by paper. A printed certificate, a warranty card, a service booklet with a stamp. Paper is separable from the watch, and it is reproducible. A convincing forgery costs almost nothing to make, and a genuine certificate can be sold alongside a fake or lost entirely, leaving a real watch with nothing to vouch for it.

Paper also cannot follow the watch through service. Movements are overhauled, dials are refinished, bezels, crowns, bracelets and crystals are replaced. The certificate records what left the factory, not what is on the wrist now, so nobody downstream can tell an original component from a later replacement.

Rethentic makes the watch its own record. Each service event is signed and written to the ledger against the item, so parts, dates and the workshop that performed the work stay attached for life. A dealer, auction house or private buyer taps it and sees the whole history, not a document that claims one.

A watchmaker’s first question is where the chip goes, because steel and gold block radio. It is positioned to read through the crystal rather than the caseback, so the case stays sealed, nothing is visible to the customer, and the tap happens through the face.

Jewelry has the same gap without the service trail. A stone’s grading report is a separate document that can be moved to another piece, and a hallmark identifies a maker without proving this is the piece they made. The chip binds the report and the hallmark to the object they describe.