The Louis Vuitton store in Lyon reinforced its display windows in advance. The people who smashed them still got inside.
That same night, luxury-store windows were shattering in Bordeaux, Marseille, Lille, and Nantes. It wasn’t just LV: Rolex, Hermès, Apple, and Sephora were all hit. The prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône, where Marseille is located, said that seven or eight thousand people had flooded the city center that night, with no demands whatsoever. Around 400 people were arrested across France, 110 of them in Paris alone. The government then announced it would deploy an additional 45,000 police officers, and Macron vowed to prosecute everyone involved in smashing and looting stores.
The unrest began as protests over the cost of living. The looters had a keen eye, choosing goods that were small, held their value, and could be resold immediately. Handbags and jewelry topped the list. It’s the same selection criteria hackers use when targeting crypto assets: quick to resell, easy to move across borders, and slow to track down. The only difference is one checkpoint: to get a stolen bag across a border, you need a person to smuggle it; an on-chain asset crosses the border with a single confirmation.
One thing worth highlighting is who owns LV. LVMH is the most active of the old-guard luxury conglomerates when it comes to issuing on-chain IDs for its products. In April 2021, it joined forces with Prada and Richemont, Cartier’s parent company, to set up a nonprofit alliance in Geneva called AURA. OTB joined later. Today, more than 50 luxury brands use it, and its website lists on-chain records for 80 million products. The original goal was a simple one: fighting counterfeits.
The underlying infrastructure is worth a mention, too. AURA runs on Quorum, a permissioned blockchain that JPMorgan developed from Ethereum. Microsoft provides the cloud infrastructure, and ConsenSys helped build it. Since 2023, it has supported public blockchains, allowing brands to mint digital certificates for individual products, keep supply-chain data on a private blockchain, and put the customer-facing information on a public one. LV’s diamond certificate is one example: a stone can be tracked all the way from the mine to the store counter.
My take is that on-chain IDs can fight counterfeiting, but they can’t stop looting. Glass will still get smashed. But they can control where stolen goods go. A stolen bag with an on-chain record is asking to be caught if it enters the legitimate secondhand market: ownership is recorded on-chain, and every transfer leaves a trace. That gives police another way to recover stolen goods without relying on the people fencing them to talk.
Here’s what I’m not sure about: how many items were carried off, and how much the losses amount to on paper. Neither the brands nor the insurers have released figures. We won’t know the full extent of the losses until the first round of assessments is complete. The unrest will end, and the shelves will be restocked. But the bags without receipts, unable to enter legitimate channels, will sit in certain drawers for a long time.
$BTC $ETH $BNB
#法国骚乱 #奢侈品 #区块链溯源 #LVMH
That same night, luxury-store windows were shattering in Bordeaux, Marseille, Lille, and Nantes. It wasn’t just LV: Rolex, Hermès, Apple, and Sephora were all hit. The prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône, where Marseille is located, said that seven or eight thousand people had flooded the city center that night, with no demands whatsoever. Around 400 people were arrested across France, 110 of them in Paris alone. The government then announced it would deploy an additional 45,000 police officers, and Macron vowed to prosecute everyone involved in smashing and looting stores.
The unrest began as protests over the cost of living. The looters had a keen eye, choosing goods that were small, held their value, and could be resold immediately. Handbags and jewelry topped the list. It’s the same selection criteria hackers use when targeting crypto assets: quick to resell, easy to move across borders, and slow to track down. The only difference is one checkpoint: to get a stolen bag across a border, you need a person to smuggle it; an on-chain asset crosses the border with a single confirmation.
One thing worth highlighting is who owns LV. LVMH is the most active of the old-guard luxury conglomerates when it comes to issuing on-chain IDs for its products. In April 2021, it joined forces with Prada and Richemont, Cartier’s parent company, to set up a nonprofit alliance in Geneva called AURA. OTB joined later. Today, more than 50 luxury brands use it, and its website lists on-chain records for 80 million products. The original goal was a simple one: fighting counterfeits.
The underlying infrastructure is worth a mention, too. AURA runs on Quorum, a permissioned blockchain that JPMorgan developed from Ethereum. Microsoft provides the cloud infrastructure, and ConsenSys helped build it. Since 2023, it has supported public blockchains, allowing brands to mint digital certificates for individual products, keep supply-chain data on a private blockchain, and put the customer-facing information on a public one. LV’s diamond certificate is one example: a stone can be tracked all the way from the mine to the store counter.
My take is that on-chain IDs can fight counterfeiting, but they can’t stop looting. Glass will still get smashed. But they can control where stolen goods go. A stolen bag with an on-chain record is asking to be caught if it enters the legitimate secondhand market: ownership is recorded on-chain, and every transfer leaves a trace. That gives police another way to recover stolen goods without relying on the people fencing them to talk.
Here’s what I’m not sure about: how many items were carried off, and how much the losses amount to on paper. Neither the brands nor the insurers have released figures. We won’t know the full extent of the losses until the first round of assessments is complete. The unrest will end, and the shelves will be restocked. But the bags without receipts, unable to enter legitimate channels, will sit in certain drawers for a long time.
$BTC $ETH $BNB
#法国骚乱 #奢侈品 #区块链溯源 #LVMH