The CEO of Arainee has a lot of plans for Web3 and consumer brands, which he thinks will be the next step toward widespread use.
“I don’t care about the bear market,” Arianee chief Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel proclaimed at NFT Paris last week in an interview with Decrypt.
Hurstel, whose company has assisted luxury brands such as Yves Saint Laurent and Moncler in issuing NFTs, explained that the market pause signifies a greater emphasis on practical use cases that will onboard more people into Web3.
“During the bull, we would get a telephone [call] every day from a brand that wants to make a million dollars with a stupid drop,” he said.
But now that the hype has cooled down, “the collections that are making money are real brands. They have a real product, they build a community around that, around creativity, collaboration,” said Hurstel.
Even so, Arianee is doing very well, which Hurstel says is a sign that it will be used more in the mainstream.
“We minted 1 million NFTs last year, we’re going to mint probably 10 million NFTs this year, with more than 50 global brands,” he said. “This is going to touch my mum, your brother, your sister.”
He said that France was a unique place to do Web3 business and that it wasn’t just new companies but also well-known brands that would drive more people to use crypto and NFTs.
“We have a rich ecosystem of brands, brands that have deep relationships across the globe,” he said. “These brands are the brands that are going to take us from 100 million users to 1 billion users. It’s through concrete, pragmatic use cases that are going to interact with people in their daily lives that Web3 is going to become mainstream.”
Real-world use cases will start to bring more people into Web3 because there will be a “good reason” for them to do so, like digital proof of ownership or a multi-brand customer loyalty program.
For example, if you bought a product that was made in a sustainable way, a digital product passport could prove the item’s credentials and let the owner prove it was theirs.
“That is going to be 80% of our minting this year,” Hurstel said. “That is going to touch wine and spirits, appliances, luxury, fashion, it’s going to help build a circularity model around this industry.”
Web3 focuses on loyalty points
Additionally, he predicted that interoperable loyalty programs will attract more people to Web3, with brands issuing tokens that consumers can use elsewhere. “Think about why you love your amex program, why I love my Amex program—it’s because the points I gain, I can transfer them to Airfrance or Delta. One-click.”
Hurstel suggested that the openness of Web3 will allow more brands to make loyalty transferable, as the cost of loyalty programs may presently be prohibitive for smaller businesses.
“The weight and cost of a loyalty program for companies is super complicated to maintain. If all of a sudden, you benefit from a network effect thanks to the wallet and the tokens, then you have an open loyalty program for everyone, everywhere.”
Content Source: decrypt.com
