Maecenas was founded on the back of a current inefficient market to buy and sell fine art. Currently dominated by the 2 largest players in the segment, the fine art industry lack technological innovation that would allow a more transparency and reduced costs for buyers and sellers. As a result, investment in fine art can only happen in the form of physical ownership and transaction fees range from 10 to 25% to both sellers and buyers. The latter comes from a lack of transparency and ease of transaction that blockchain technology could solve.

Maecenas leverages blockchain technology to fully democratise access to fine art investment. By tokenising art, the platform converts million-dollar blue-chip artworks into smaller financial units that can be bought and sold easily globally through a transparent marketplace. This provides investors with liquidity and a much-needed market-driven price discovery mechanism.

Maecenas tokenises fine art by creating blockchain-based digital shares giving investors the possibility to own fractions of masterpieces and build fine art portfolios. Maecenas aims to be to fine art what NASDAQ is to the stock market.

Blockchain creates an immutable, traceable record of every transaction, whether it’s art changing hands or Bitcoin, and this provenance trail provides the trust needed in a currently largely unregulated market. It can provide better standards for verifiable, global certification.

Artwork provenance is all the accompany documentation that confirms its authenticity. Since the blockchain is a ledger — a list of transactions — it is a low-friction and low-cost method for keeping record and proof of authenticity. Many traditional artwork records are still kept manually, and there is currently no central database. The blockchain can provide a single, world-wide, real-time access point to the storage of tamper-proof provenance documentation.

We are exploring the NEM ecosystem to evaluate the feasibility of using NEM’s platform for the tracking of provenance and the tokenization of artworks. At an initial phase, we will start working on integrating the XEM currency into the Maecenas platform, as a payment method.

William Tan (NEM Singapore County Leader) & Marcelo García Casil (Maecenas Founder & CEO)

“NEM is one of the pioneer projects in the crypto space. They have fostered a very strong global community who supports and helps the project advance and implement innovative technology features which are superior to other blockchain projects. We at Maecenas are very excited to join the NEM ecosystem, to learn and benefit from their platform and support, and likewise to showcase and share our learnings and expertise within the asset tokenization space with community members worldwide.” — Marcelo García Casil | Founder & CEO

Social media links/website: https://www.maecenas.co/ https://medium.com/maecenas https://www.linkedin.com/company/maecenas/ https://twitter.com/maecenasfineart https://www.facebook.com/maecenasart