At the time of this writing, Freeport is pre-alpha and has about a month to go before it will be ready for marketplace creation. I decided to include it anyway because it offers a really nice counterpart to the Pixura platform.

Freeport is the brainchild of Joe Looney, the developer behind Rare Pepe Wallet. Joe is creating Freeport as a completely open-source solution (MIT License), so if you are technical, you can use all the code to do whatever want with it. But Freeport is specifically designed with less technical people in mind. With just a little Bitcoin, from a single interface you will be able to:

Create your asset (CounterParty)

Upload your art (Imgur)

Attach it to the asset (CounterParty)

Search a directory (DigiRare.com)

Put orders up to sell through the DEX (decentralized exchanged)

Joe has brilliantly structured Freeport to use several existing best-in-class, off-the-shelf solutions, including Imgur, CounterParty, and DigiRare. These decisions were born out of necessity to simplify maintenance and upkeep (Joe is building Freeport for fun in his free time), but this strategy may turn out to be Freeport’s greatest strength. As Joe puts it:

The Bitcoin blockchain is good at creating scarce digital assets (via Counterparty) and then allowing the uncensorable transfer of them. It is not good for storing images. Even with IPFS, any projects utilizing it are generally running their IPFS node for storage. The only way to guarantee that images stored via IPFS are available is to maintain a node and host them yourself, and at that point what are you really even doing? With Freeport, as the developer I don’t need to run any additional software to host images because an image hosting service (Imgur initially) will be hosting them for me. My plan is to also include options to use other hosting services and eventually allow artists to specify custom image locations. Since I am building Freeport in my free time, I don’t want the responsibility of curating questionable content. One of the problems with something like IPFS or self-hosted storage is that you, the developer, maintain that responsibility. To eliminate that additional work, I’ve leveraged a hosted storage that has its own code of conduct. It also demonstrates that “decentralized storage” is a fun thing to have, but it’s not absolutely necessary. Immutability is achieved by including a hash of the image as well as the image location (Imgur URL) as part of the asset information stored on the Bitcoin blockchain via Counterparty. If Imgur were to become unavailable, the artist has the ability to update the image location, however the hash remains unchained. This means if the artist changes the contents of the image, it is obvious from the record that it’s not the original. Imgur is great at providing the means for everyone to see the image initially and the foreseeable future. However, over time, it becomes the responsibility of the issuer and asset holders to retain the image themselves.

Looney also takes advantage of CounterParty on the back end for token issuance and Bitcorns creator Dan Anderson’s excellent DigiRare site which is designed to provide a directory to view all art and collectibles on the Bitcoin blockchain.

While Freeport is still a few weeks off from launching, you can install the beta as a Chrome browser extension and be among the first to use it when it is ready for prime time.

To install Freeport.io:

Download the Chrome extension

Go to chrome://extensions/ in your Chrome browser.

Make sure “Developer Mode” is selected and click on "Load Unpacked"

Select the directory "Chrome Extension"

Be sure to follow Looney on Twitter at @wasthatawolf for updates on the additional functionality in Freeport as it becomes available.

Summary

Hopefully you found this article/tutorial helpful and you are off to the races building your own marketplace and tokenizing your own art and collectibles. I don’t think you can really do wrong by going with either Pixura or Freeport. Hopefully I have outlined the differences between the two enough that you know which one is right for you. Here is a quick summary:

Availability Pixura is live and you can launch a marketplace today Freeport is in alpha and will be ready in roughly a month

Blockchain Pixura lives on the Ethereum blockchain Freeport lives on the Bitcoin blockchain

Support Pixura provides support to paying customers Freeport: Joe provides support when he can (this is his side project)

Fees Pixura charges $25 to launch a market, $1 to launch a collectible, and takes a 3% fee for all transactions on your marketplace Freeport is a community project with zero fees

Architecture Pixura utilizes the same proprietary code used on SuperRare Freeport leverages a combination of solutions (Bitcoin, CounterParty, DigiRare, Imgur) and is open source under the MIT license



Conclusion

It is a really exciting time for those of us that have been following the development of art and collectibles on the blockchain. You no longer need to understand the complexities of writing your own smart contracts to launch your own art digital collectibles marketplace, and that should be huge in driving mainstream adoption for creators.

However, I believe the next big problem is going to be growing the number of collectors. One of the great advantages of participating in a marketplace like SuperRare as an artist is they do all the marketing for you. I think some artists may realize that putting their art “on the blockchain” does not necessarily translate to more sales. You still need to find someone interested in buying/collecting your work. And the number of people who know how to buy art using cryptocurrency is even smaller than the number of people who know how to buy art with fiat (regular currency). An increase in the number and variety of digitally scarce objects we can collect could bring in new collectors to the market, but it could also flood the market and reduce demand.

I’m optimistic that an increase in “scarce digital goods” in the gaming market could help drive adoption and understanding for the blockchain art market as well. At least in the short term, I think we’ll see a spike as people explore these new tools and innovate in ways that nobody has thought of yet. And hopefully we’ll see a bit more of the weird blockchain 1.0 spirit come back to the community.

Thanks for reading, as always if you have questions or ideas you can reach out to me directly at jason@artnome.com.