If that Rolex you’ve got your eye on is getting more expensive, Bitcoin may be to blame. The last time the cryptocurrency rallied, in 2021, it presaged a bubble in second-hand watch prices. There’s a fair chance that the recent resurgence that’s seen Bitcoin climb to a record will boost the values of timepieces, but for now, a repeat of the unprecedented escalation we saw back then looks some way off.

The prices at which watches change hands in the secondary market have moved broadly in line with both Bitcoin and the S&P 500 index over the past five years or so. The correlation between crypto and timepieces wasn’t exact last time the currency took off; Bitcoin lost almost half of its value between early November 2021 and late January 2022, yet watch prices didn’t peak until March 2022.