The secondary watch market is one of the fastest-growing asset classes in the world. Pre-owned luxury timepieces now trade at an estimated fifteen billion dollars a year globally. Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Audemars Piguet pieces regularly change hands at six and seven figures. The buyer pool spans six continents.
The infrastructure underneath all of this has not kept up.
One in three pre-owned watches submitted for sale on leading marketplaces failed an authenticity check in the second half of 2025. That rejection rate was one in four in 2023. The market is growing. The fraud problem is growing faster.
As CTO of AllChrono, I spend a significant amount of my time thinking about why authentication is hard to solve at scale and what a real solution actually requires. This is my attempt to explain both.
Why Existing Authentication Does Not Travel
The watch industry currently operates on a fragmented, platform-specific authentication model. When a dealer or marketplace authenticates a watch, the result is a document — a PDF, a graded certificate, or a badge inside one platform's interface.
That document belongs to the platform that issued it.
A buyer in Riyadh looking at a watch from a New York dealer cannot verify the dealer's own authentication independently. A collector reselling a piece they purchased with a third-party certificate must hope the next buyer trusts that certificate — because there is no standard that makes it machine-verifiable.
Authentication certificates in the watch industry today are like cashier's checks: they prove something happened at a specific moment with a specific counterparty, but they require trust in that counterparty and cannot be independently verified.
Compare this to how diamonds are sold. The Gemological Institute of America operates independently of every dealer and every marketplace. A GIA certificate is trusted because the institution issuing it has no commercial interest in the underlying transaction. A buyer in Dubai can verify a stone graded in New York because the standard is universal.
Watches have no equivalent. They never have.
Why Super Clones Changed the Stakes
For most of the past decade, watch authentication was a niche concern. High-end fakes existed, but identifying them required serious expertise that casual buyers did not have access to and most dealers did not need on a daily basis.
Super clones changed this.
Modern high-quality counterfeits of the most liquid references — Royal Oak, Nautilus, Submariner, Daytona — are produced at a level of precision that is difficult to detect by eye and, in some cases, by conventional visual inspection alone. Weight, finishing, movement sound, and case geometry have all been replicated with increasing fidelity.
The watch market has responded by adding authentication requirements. But the solution has remained fragmented: each platform builds its own verification process, each dealer applies their own expertise, and the result cannot be shared or verified outside the originating relationship.
The rejection rate increase from 23% to 38% over two years is partly a measurement effect — more watches are being submitted for authentication because more buyers are demanding it. But it also reflects a genuine increase in sophisticated fraud entering the market as transaction volumes increase.
When valuable assets lack portable, verifiable provenance, the incentive to commit fraud grows with the value of the market.
What a Neutral Infrastructure Layer Actually Requires
The watch industry needs what every serious financial market has already built: a neutral standard that sits between buyers and sellers and produces records that neither party can modify.
Cars got CarFax. Diamonds got GIA. Watches have neither.
Building this for watches requires solving three problems that platform-specific solutions cannot address.
The first problem is neutrality. A certificate is only as trustworthy as the issuing party's independence from the transaction. Authentication sold as a service by the same platform earning commission on the sale is not neutral. AllChrono's authentication is designed to function as an independent verification — the certified record travels with the watch regardless of where it is eventually sold.
The second problem is permanence. A platform that shuts down takes its authentication history with it. A PDF that lives in a seller's email archive is only as durable as that email account. The record needs to exist independently of any company, any platform, or any individual's continued operation. This is where blockchain becomes genuinely useful rather than merely fashionable.
The third problem is portability. Even a neutral and permanent record is only valuable if it can be read by the next buyer, the next platform, and the next authenticator. A closed ecosystem of authentication records does not solve the industry's problem — it creates a different silo.
The certificate has to travel with the watch. Not the seller. Not the platform. The watch.
What We Built and Why We Made the Choices We Made
AllChrono's passport is built on the Arianee protocol, running on Polygon. We chose this stack for reasons that are worth stating plainly.
Arianee is an open standard with MIT-licensed smart contracts already deployed on Polygon. The contracts cannot be removed by anyone, including Arianee itself. If Arianee as an organisation ceased to operate tomorrow, every passport minted through its contracts would remain publicly readable and transferable. We retain the option to fork the contracts if needed. We are not dependent on any single company's continued existence, including our own.
Polygon gives us a public, EVM-compatible chain with low transaction costs. Each passport costs approximately fifteen to twenty cents to mint. This matters because authentication at scale requires economics that make it practical to document every piece, not just the most valuable ones.
We chose a photographic fingerprint as the primary physical-digital binding rather than NFC chips because it works on vintage pieces. A Royal Oak from 1972 cannot be chipped without modification. It can be photographed in high detail — dial printing, serial placement, hand alignment, case wear — and that photograph becomes a biometric record that can be matched at every subsequent re-authentication. No two watches of the same reference share these characteristics exactly.
The passport is publicly readable. Any buyer, dealer, insurer, or competing marketplace can verify an AllChrono authentication using nothing but the token ID. We earn nothing from external reads. The open access is deliberate: authentication that only works inside our marketplace is not a neutral standard, it is a competitive moat. We are building the former.
What Changes When Authentication Works
The most important thing that changes when authentication is genuinely portable and verifiable is not the buyer experience, although that improves significantly.
It is the economics of trust.
Today, dealers who build strong personal reputations over decades earn a premium over unknown sellers because their word carries weight that cannot be independently verified. That premium is real but fragile — it does not transfer, it cannot be delegated, and it ends when the individual does.
A portable provenance record shifts some of that premium from the individual relationship to the object itself. A watch with a verifiable, immutable history of authentication events, service records, and ownership transfers commands a premium that its seller cannot give away, and that its buyer cannot lose.
That is the outcome we are building toward.
The watch industry has operated on personal trust for centuries because there was no alternative. There is one now.
— Raihan Ahmed, CTO, AllChrono