Artwallet.io treads new ground

Let’s Change The Art World

The way art and high-value collectibles have been sold over the past 300 years has remained the same. Despite the lack in innovation the value of private art collections is estimated to reach 3 trillion dollars by 2026 with the value of online art marketplaces projected to hit $9.14 billion by 2021.

The collection of art masterpieces has been the exclusive playground for the rich and powerful for far too long; ArtWallet is here to turn this upside down.

The State of the Art Market

There are three primary means for people to purchase fine art today:

Auction houses; Art investment funds; or Galleries and private dealers.

Each option comes with a complex, costly, and time-consuming process where buyers are charged exorbitant transaction fees and face high barriers to entry:

Auction houses charge anywhere from 20 to 30% commission fees on a masterpiece’s final hammer price;

Art investment funds have high investment thresholds with multi-year lock-in periods resulting in significant barriers to entry for investors. Performance fees run as high as 20% of profits and also come with annual management fees; and

Purchases made through galleries and private dealers generally are not made at market price due to the lack of transparency and informational asymmetry between parties.

Due to the stagnant rate of innovation of the art market and in how art is sold, many inefficiencies present themselves in the art market today such as:

Lack of price transparency;

Oligarchy within the art market;

Increasingly high barriers to entry;

Fake and fraudulent masterpieces within the marketplace;

Lack of liquidity for artists, private collectors, galleries, and museums; and

Complex, costly, and time consuming processes to buying and selling art.

“Spurred on by our own frustrations toward the problems in the art market today, we aim to address them through ArtWallet, a new innovative blockchain-powered marketplace where users can buy and trade tokens tied to a masterpiece through ArtWallet’s exchange.”

Where Art Meets Blockchain

Fundamental to ArtWallet’s platform is the custom-built proof-of-stake blockchain, “DNAchain”, where the DNA of each artwork, including provenance and other pertinent data is immutably recorded ensuring the authenticity of each artwork that enters ArtWallet’s ecosystem.

Through our “Initial Art Offering” (IAO) process each artwork is securitized with “masterpiece” tokens that represent a fractional ownership in the masterpiece. All participants within our ecosystem — whether artists, collectors, investors, galleries, or museums — may purchase, sell, and hold these tokens representing partial ownership in a masterpiece.

DNAChain will be powered by the “BUYART” utility tokens that run the smart contracts linking the individual masterpieces to their corresponding tokens. The BUYART token will further enable users to access platform to trade these works of art over the ARTex exchange.

Benefits to Market Participants

We aim to radically increase transparency throughout the art market and cement trust between buyers and sellers. This will be done through reducing the need for intermediaries by replacing brokers with smart contracts that have clearly defined auction rules, bidding systems, and income distribution mechanics.

Through tokenized masterpieces, various works of art can be bought and sold effortlessly through the platform thus lowering the entry barriers to purchasing and owning fine art. Individual investors and portfolio managers will be able to enter these markets and price their positions accurately and diversify their risk by investing in a wide range of different art assets.

Collectors, dealers, and galleries will have far greater access to liquidity by selling their art quickly through “Initial Art Offering” auctions without being charged hefty fees or having to take up expensive securitized loans against their artwork.

Comparison of transaction fees to traditional channels

Finally, artists can also take advantage of the ArtWallet platform by retaining a percentage of equity in their artwork allowing artists for the first time ever, to also benefit from the appreciated market value of their artwork.

By offering an open and agile marketplace to the art industry, we envision far greater liquidity, growth, and value being created as millions of new investors who have only been able to watch from the sidelines enter the market in droves.

The Art World is Set for Change

Artwallet aims to make the art market accessible to everyone, from those who wish to own and trade their share in a blue-chip masterpiece, to talented new artists struggling to earn a living.

Just as Amazon created immense value by opening up new opportunities to market participants in the eCommerce and publishing world, ArtWallet strives to accomplish the same in the world of art.

Art is merely the beginning as we plan to become the go-to platform and solution for both trading art and collectibles in the future.

We invite you to join us in this journey of storing the DNA of art on the blockchain and democratizing the industry one masterpiece at a time!

ArtWallet Team

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Website: https://artwallet.io

Whitepaper: artw.lt/whitepaper

Telegram: https://t.me/artwallet

Twitter: https://twitter.com/artwallet