ZUG, Switzerland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CasperLabs, a leading blockchain solutions company, and its partner Metacask, a premier spirit marketplace leveraging blockchain technology to modernize the high-end whisky cask investment market, have launched Metacask’s non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace on the Casper blockchain. The blockchain-based marketplace opens the door for all consumers interested in buying, selling and collecting their own luxury whisky casks, allowing them to easily hold cask NFTs to build their value and take physical delivery of all the bottles from the cask.
“For the whisky aficionados and amateur collectors, blockchain technology makes buying and selling whisky casks much easier and more secure than older, clunkier methods, but not all blockchain networks and organizations are created equal,” said Nim Siriwardana, co-founder of Metacask. “We chose CasperLabs as our blockchain partner because they build their solutions on the Casper blockchain, which is known for superior security standards, performance, enterprise scalability, operational costs and energy efficiency.”
“As Metacask’s whisky marketplace demonstrates, business applications using NFTs stretch far beyond the well-known use cases of purchasing digital art, collectibles and music,” said Mrinal Manohar, CEO & co-founder of CasperLabs. “Companies can use Casper’s NFT technology to identify, track and prove ownership of any physical item and link them back to the blockchain, a capability that is invaluable for tracking items through the supply chain, protecting intellectual property and patents, authenticating precious valuables, and much more.”
As the world’s first NFT whisky cask marketplace, Metacask’s platform will modernize the sale and ownership of whisky casks through provenance, tracking, authentication and valuation over time. The blockchain-enabled platform boasts significant operational efficiencies over the prevailing manual processes for whisky sales and also focuses heavily on setting exceptional security standards, including mandatory Know Your Customer (KYC) & Anti-Money Laundering (AML) checks. KYC capabilities are key to accurately verifying the identities of marketplace users and avoiding fraud and other illegal activities, as well as protecting the data of users.
The CasperLabs team assisted in developing the smart contracts for minting the whisky NFT as well as the KYC process and auction mechanics for the Metacask platform. Metacask will benefit from CasperLabs’ partnership with Civic, a leading innovator in digital identity solutions, which has launched Civic Pass on the Casper blockchain. Civic Pass allows dApps built on Casper to meet their KYC requirements. Metacask will use Civic Pass’s identity and age verification processes to determine whether participants meet their requirements.
Metacask will also be able to take advantage of mutable NFTs that are available on the Casper blockchain. As a whisky cask ages, the whisky maker must periodically check on the state of the cask. Because Casper NFTs are mutable, rather than immutable like on other blockchain networks, the whisky maker can update the metadata of the NFT with the state of the cask to keep the NFT owner informed of the condition of the spirit.
The casks themselves are held permanently in Scotland in Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs-regulated facilities. The casks are monitored by the facilities and can be re-gauged at any time for a fee. The owner of a tokenized cask may request that bottles from their cask be delivered to them.
Metacask launched its NFT marketplace on April 5, 2022 with an initial sequence of auctions of 11 cask NFTs from the platform’s genesis collection called the Vanishing Spirits. One of the casks has already sold for $9,000. The initial 10 casks released for auction are a mix of casks from the most important production areas in Scotland. The 11th cask will be revealed when the token is minted for a special live auction later this year.
Consumers interested in signing up for Metacask’s whisky cask NFT marketplace should visit Metacask’s website.
Visit the CasperLabs blog to learn more about how CasperLabs is unlocking blockchain opportunities to future-proof enterprises.
About CasperLabs
CasperLabs, a leading blockchain software company for the enterprise market, is re-imagining blockchain for enterprise with a future proof solution. The company also provides development, support and advisory services for organizations building on the Casper network. Guided by open-source principles, CasperLabs is committed to supporting the next wave of blockchain adoption among businesses and providing developers with a reliable and secure framework to build private, public and hybrid blockchain applications. Its team possesses deep enterprise technology experience with a cumulative 100 years of enterprise experience, hailing from organizations including Google, Adobe, AWS, Dropbox and Microsoft. To learn more, visit https://casperlabs.io/.
About Metacask
Metacask is the premier NFT marketplace for the sale of whisky casks. Developed by a team of highly-respected whisky brokers and digital asset technologists, the Metacask platform sets out to modernize the sale and ownership of whisky casks through the use of NFTs attached to the physical product. These NFTs serve as a form of digital title of deed, with complete transparency – not just in possession and provenance, but also for the purposes of price discovery.
Learn more about Metacask: metacask.com.
