Toke Match held 1,700 Rolexes for their owners, and 1,300 turned up in pawnshops

Toke Match was a peer-to-peer luxury watch rental service launched in January 2021 by Osaka-based Neo Reverse. The model was simple: owners entrusted their Rolexes and other high-end watches to the platform, which rented them to individuals and paid owners a monthly commission based on the watch's grade. By August 2023, the service claimed access to 1,500 watches.

Neo Reverse shut the site abruptly on 31 January 2024, and owners asking for their watches back found there were none to give. Police in 45 prefectures took complaints from about 650 people, aged from their twenties to their eighties. The reports covered roughly 1,700 watches with a market value of about ¥2.8 billion — around $18 million — and about 1,300 of them were traced to 110 pawnshops and secondhand dealers around the country. The custody model had no escrow and no insurance behind it: one intermediary was holding billions of yen of other people's property on nothing but its own word.

The structure is the case. A peer-to-peer rental platform concentrates physical assets it does not own, in a category with a deep, liquid, anonymous resale market, under no custody regulation at all — and the monthly fee paid to owners is what persuades them to hand the assets over. Every element that made the proposition attractive is also what made the loss possible. Japan's regulatory gap in the luxury sharing economy has been under discussion since.