SBI Traceability announced on 16 September 2026 that SHIMENAWA, its blockchain traceability service, had been used on artworks for the first time. The deployment was a solo exhibition of oil paintings in Ginza, Tokyo, where an NFC tag sat on the caption panel beside each picture and a tap opened the artist’s own account of how the work came about.
The show was “Owada Izumi Exhibition: Dancing with Colour”, a solo exhibition by the oil painter Izumi Owada at Gallery Sakuranoki in Ginza, which ran from 5 to 20 September 2026. Owada is a member of the Japan International Artists Society, a founding member of the Paris International Salon, a Taylor Foundation member and a permanent member of Le Salon. One of the works shown was titled “Passion”.
The mechanics are deliberately undemanding. A dedicated NFC tag is fixed to the introduction panel next to the work, a visitor holds a smartphone against it, and a browser page opens with nothing to install and no account to create, which is the pattern most consumer NFC deployments have settled on. The page carries the basics a caption card already gives, technique and dimensions, and then the material a caption card has no room for: the thinking and the background behind the piece.
Buyers get more than a visit. When a work sells, an NFC tag is supplied enclosed with it, so the owner can keep tapping back to the title, the details and the records held against that piece long after the show has come down. That is the part being sold here: an information channel that stays with the object once it leaves the gallery.
What SHIMENAWA actually is
SBI Traceability Co., Ltd. is an unlisted member of Japan’s SBI Group, founded in April 2021, capitalised at 100 million yen and based at Izumi Garden Tower in Roppongi, Tokyo. SHIMENAWA is its traceability service: IC tags, meaning RFID and NFC, paired with a blockchain ledger that assigns a unique ID to a physical item or card and holds the associated information centrally. The service covers authenticity verification, recording of usage and distribution history, delivery of digital content through the tag, and shipping and inventory management.
The ledger underneath is Corda, an enterprise distributed ledger built for regulated industries, where transaction data is shared only with the parties involved rather than broadcast to every node. Riku Saito, Director and CTO of SBI Traceability, has described Corda as excelling at security while facing challenges on speed, and said that displaying information without delay when a consumer taps an NFC tag took extensive testing to get a fast response while preserving the integrity of the ledger. That is the real engineering problem in tag-plus-ledger products stated plainly: the tap is instant, the consumer’s patience lasts a second or two, and the ledger is the slow part.
From sake bottles to canvases
SHIMENAWA’s established territory is Japanese sake, with further use in apparel, confectionery, grains and construction materials. The driver in sake is blunt: counterfeit premium bottles fetch very high prices in overseas markets.
In November 2024, Asahi Shuzo used SHIMENAWA on DASSAI Beyond the Beyond 2024, described as the world’s first NFC tag with an opening-detection function compatible with titanium. The titanium part matters technically. NFC tags normally cannot be read when placed on metal, because the metal affects the frequency band the tag’s internal antenna is tuned to and the reader gets nothing back. The tag was fitted to a custom titanium bottle made by SUS Corporation and sealed, so SHIMENAWA could show the bottle was unopened and genuine after leaving the brewery. In May 2025, Imayo Tsukasa’s Koi Shirogane sake used custom logo-embedded tags with opening detection on the bottle cap.
The art tags are custom logo-embedded NFC tags co-developed with Uni Tag Co., Ltd., the Japanese tag maker behind the DASSAI titanium tag. SHIMENAWA has used more than one supplier across its deployments, Sato among them on a separate sake project, which suggests tags are specified per application rather than being one standard product carried from job to job. Neither company has published the chip used in the art tags.
The binding question
This is where the art deployment differs from the sake one in a way worth thinking about. On a bottle, the tag sits under or across the cap and a tamper loop in the tag’s antenna circuit breaks when the seal is broken. The result is binary, and the tag is physically bound to the thing it protects: you cannot get at the sake without destroying the evidence.
A painting has no seal to break. At the exhibition the tag was on the caption panel rather than the canvas, and the buyer’s tag is enclosed with the work rather than bonded into the stretcher or the frame. A tag that travels alongside an object is a weaker binding than one that has to be destroyed to open it, and no public material from SBI Traceability says whether the art tags are destructive on removal. For an RFID audience, that is the open question.
In fairness, nothing SBI Traceability has said requires a different answer. The company positions this as value transmission and information management, carrying the artist’s intent and the work’s record to the viewer and then to the owner. Counterfeit countermeasures, proper management of provenance and rising interest in digital authenticity checking appear in the release as market conditions, not as claims about this installation. The question is where the technology goes next, not a gap between promise and delivery.
Provenance and exhibition history increasingly shape how a work is understood and valued, and a gallery caption card has never had room for either. A tag on a caption panel is a modest start. The interesting version arrives when the tag is bonded into the work itself, as hard to remove intact as the tamper loop under a sake cap.
