In the hills surrounding Venice sit two of Italy’s most productive wine regions, and a new business changing the wine market. While vineyards are busy producing sparkling Proseccos to rich reds, these fine wines often sit for years as they mature, leaving producers cash constrained as their greatest assets are in storage. Alessandra Tugnolo saw an opportunity. Her business, The Glass Élite, tokenizes wine as a real world asset, allowing wineries to monetize stock, buying and selling wine using blockchain technology while enabling collectors and buyers to invest in appreciating assets.
“You can’t go to a bank with a cellar of wine and ask for a loan. But in crypto, you can use a certified NFT as collateral,” explains Alessandra. This allows wine to be bought and sold without moving it, and allows wineries to utilize en primeur sales, where wine is sold before it is bottled and distributed. These innovative strategies unlock capital for wineries to use while their wines age and provide future certainty before the product releases.
Beyond the Blockchain
The Glass Élite is also redefining the storytelling of wine. Through digital certificates, immersive web experiences, and eventually metaverse applications, the platform connects consumers to the terroir, winemakers, and enologists in an interactive way.
Digital payments are central to both the immersive platform and the blockchain sale aspects of business. Alessandra uses Stripe, PayPal, Visa, and traditional bank transfers. Glass Élite then puts the sales through blockchain to ensure transparent and secure transactions and tracks authenticity through NFC tags.
A main theme of both Glass Élite’s business and the digital payments they rely on are efficiency. Immediate payment settlement improves wineries’ cash flow, while buyers gain transparency and a trust in the wine they can’t yet taste. “This is a pioneering test,” Alessandra says. “We’re proving that wine can be a real-world asset, that liquidity can flow to wineries, and that collectors can benefit from the appreciation over time.”
Navigating a New Space
Italy and the rest of Europe have imposed significant digital compliance requirements. Navigating the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation (MiCA) makes Glass Élite one of the first real world assets in Europe under the new regime. Central to this pioneering endeavor are cybersecurity and customer trust. Ensuring the protection of digital wallets and certificates is essential to customer adoption.
The next frontier for Glass Élite is the integration of crypto payments. Crypto and NFTs would help the business manage traceability, certification, and collateralization. As they grow, application programming interfaces (“APIs”) allow integration with the Glass Élite platform, critical for managing transactions as they expand to new countries and currencies.
