For most of my career, I’ve been building regulated platforms for some of the largest financial institutions in the UK and Europe. I’ve worked on projects where trust, compliance, and transparency were non-negotiable. But when I turned my attention to Scotland’s whisky cask market — something close to home — I saw a very different picture.
Today, most whisky casks are bought and sold through opaque broker channels. Buyers often wire money without ever seeing what they own. Provenance is hard to verify. Exit paths are limited, usually back through the same broker. And as fraud and fake schemes increase, the very reputation of Scotch whisky is at risk.
I built CannyCask because I knew this could be better.
CannyCask is the first HMRC-approved platform to tokenise whisky casks. Every cask is verified by both the bonded warehouse and us before being tokenised — a patent-pending dual-signature process that makes provenance fraud-proof. Every ownership certificate is secured on the Polygon blockchain, with custody handled by BitGo, the same provider trusted by global financial institutions.
This isn’t just about technology — it’s about trust. It’s about giving whisky collectors, brokers, and institutions a way to prove that what they own is real, securely held, and transparently documented.
The bigger picture is that whisky is joining a new wave of tokenised real-world assets — a $10 trillion market by 2030. Alternative investments are booming, and 27% of high-net-worth individuals plan to invest in whisky within the next three years. By combining Scotland’s heritage with Web3 infrastructure, CannyCask is making whisky a bankable, tradable, and trusted digital asset.
This is only the start. Our vision is that every cask will be auditable, tokenised, and trusted — whether you’re an individual buyer, a broker, a cooperage, or a bank.
That’s why I built CannyCask.
— Alex Preston, Founder & CEO