Happy New Year! Ushering in 2018!

The Maecenas team hopes you had a great holiday season and wishes you every successes for 2018! Amidst the festive season, we've been featured in Artnome and on The Blockchain Show.

The Blockchain Art Market is Here

The blockchain matters to the art market. Artists and art collectors are now taking blockchain seriously and monitoring the market. There are at least four major areas where blockchain will disrupt the art market:

1. Driving digital art sales through digital scarcity

2. Democratizing fine art investment

3. Improving provenance and reducing art forgery

4. Creating a more ethical way of paying artists

If you fancy yourself a “serious” collector of blue-chip art, perhaps you are thinking the blockchain is only about $11.00 digital drawings and cartoon cats and punks. Think again.

In 2018, Maecenas will be launching the first open blockchain platform that democratizes access to fine art. Now people who have always dreamed of owning famous paintings can buy shares in a Picasso, Warhol, Monet, etc. On the flipside, galleries, museums, and collectors can offer up works from their collection for bid on Maecenas to raise money for the purchase of future works (while leaving their collection intact). This may sound like a regular art fund, but remember that blockchain cuts out the middleman, greatly reducing the transaction costs. The transaction cost with blockchain is so low that Maecenas can theoretically let you invest as little as fractions of a penny using cryptocurrency without taking the hit of transaction fees. Maecenas shares the use case below on their website. It does a nice job of illustrating the savings that occur with using blockchain versus traditional transactions.

“A Gallery wants to acquire a $3M piece to expand its Warhol collection. Instead of getting a three-year art-secured loan at 13.5% annual interest, it can raise funds from Maecenus investors by listing some of their artwork at a 6% one-off fee. This represents a saving of over $400k in fees for the gallery.”

Great for the gallery, but what about the investors? The investors also benefit from the magic of blockchain. Because fees and the cost of transactions goes dramatically down with blockchain, and cryptocurrency can be infinitely divided, Maecenus can transform artworks valued at tens of millions of dollars into tiny digital units that can be easily bought and sold in real time: essentially a stock market for art, but with far less friction or fees.

I am a huge fan of the model because it capitalizes on so many aspects of what makes blockchain so powerful opens up fine-art investing to everyone. My friends and family should expect fractional shares in blue chip art for many birthdays and Christmases to come.

Click here to read the full article from Artnome.