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f you want to get your hands on the newest Hublot Big Bang watch, you’ll need to pay in bitcoin. The innovative Swiss watch company started taking pre-orders for this limitededition US$25,000 model in September exclusively through a partnership with Octagon Strategy Limited (OSL), a digital asset brokerage firm.
Hublot’s new watch commemorates bitcoin’s 10th anniversary: It’s limited to 210 pieces in a nod to the finite 21 million bitcoin, and each watch bezel will be engraved with the identification number of the bitcoin transaction.
The move leaves Hublot largely alone at the starting gate of luxury product manufacturers getting into the bitcoin race. Although a secondary market for art, automobiles and other luxury goods sold for cryptocurrency is quickly growing, luxury manufacturers have remained leery of subjecting their financial performance to the wildly fluctuating emerging markets.
Executives at Hublot say they believe they have solved the problem of currency fluctuations with a hedging mechanism, opening a means to a new fount of customers. The watch’s price was set (for pre-orders) in dollars and fixed at bitcoin’s value on 31 October, allowing Hublot to make immediate trades that