ARTBLOC- A Next-Gen Art Blockchain Project

ARTBLOC is an Art Blockchain project which aims to build a community for sharing art critique and all other art-related information as well as provide a platform for art investment. It promotes the growth of the art market while supporting artists and making art more accessible. ARTBLOC integrates artwork with cryptocurrency while simplifying the art transactions that often involve complex procedures.

Introducing ARTBLOC

ARTBLOC, a blockchain project has been formed by and for all artists and art lovers. It provides innovative art services specially designed for crowd financing and blockchain-based artworks. This integration of cryptocurrency with artwork will not only expand the volumes of trades in the art-commerce market but as a result, the artwork will be made as an extremely liquid asset.

This project plans to create an online art trade platform and build an infrastructure for business, where an art piece by an emerging artist with a potential for growth can be tokenized and be traded freely by the investors, just like how a company’s shares are traded via stock markets.

The project will focus on fractional ownership sales of masterpiece while ARTBLOC Hub will cover emerging artists.

Why And How ARTBLOC Started?

The mission of ARTBLOC is to build a global art marketplace that addresses and resolves the existing problems of traditional art markets.  Three main issues that are restricting the growth of art commerce markets-

• The investor has to purchase an expensive art piece in its entirety and has to furnish the high seed funding
• Typically, the art-commerce market operates in an offline environment which makes it restrictive and enclosed
• The art trades are limited between artist and collector in the primary market or between collector and collector in the secondary market

These issues make the inflow of additional outside investment difficult into the art commerce market. Hence, ARTBLOC was conceptualized to resolve the above problems by introducing ARTBLOC MarketPlace and ARTBLOC HUB. 

The ARTBLOC HUB encourages and empowers artists to actively participate in creating a more interactive art community platform. The users can share various art-related information with other users and for their contribution, they get ARTB Tokens as a reward. This ARTBLOC HUB through the information gathered by various users, can collect data related to artwork and share with any verified user.

On the other hand, the ARTBLOC MarketPlace tokenizes the fractionalized rights of the masterpieces with investment value. The tokens purchased from ARTBLOC by the investors can be traded at the ARTBLOC OTC desk or via affiliated external trading platforms. When a piece of art is tokenized and these tokens are sold to the public, ownership of that artwork is transferred to ARTBLOC MarketPlace. However, the owner of the artwork will still retain the physical possession of that artwork. 

Therefore, ARTBLOC MarketPlace increases the liquidity of the artwork as an investment asset.

ARTBLOC Ecosystem

The art galleries, artists, collectors, and many others can upload the artworks owned by them through ARTBLOC HUB and create a digital history of the artworks that they upload. Numerous users can leave their reviews and interpretations of other user’s artwork and based on the number of votes the user’s interpretation or reviews receives, the ARTB tokens are allotted.

The art agencies, art fairs, art auctions, art e-commerce companies, and art galleries can form ARTBLOC alliance and participate in ARTBLOC project. 

The ARTBLOC consists of mainly two types of tokens- Art Backed Tokens (ABT) and ARTB. 

The ARTB is rewarded as compensation for providing the necessary content to create a digital record of the artwork. Besides that, ARTB can be used to request an art review from a specific user or can be used to post a sponsored advertisement. Once the advertisement fee is paid by using ARTB, it is burned, thus increasing the value of the ARTB.

The ABT is issued under the name of the listed artwork and will be issued only when the artwork gets an approval from the investment committee that comprises of ARTBLOC MarketPlace and ARTBLOC custody.

ARTBLOC In A Nutshell

Artworks are recognized as valuable assets and are important investment vehicles. However, despite the growing popularity of art investment, the numbers are still not that high. The art market that comprises of two layers, where the primary market allows artists to sell their artworks to art collectors and the secondary market allows the art collectors to re-sell artwork to other collectors. However, due to personal ownership, the process was ending at the first layer itself thus limiting the growth of transactions. Therefore, to facilitate investments, it was important to improve the fluidity of the market.

The ARTBLOC utilizes the blockchain technology to trade fractionalized art ownership in the form of tokens. By converting into tokens on a secure blockchain-based platform, investors can easily purchase and trade ownership of the artwork. Therefore, resulting in the creation of a new market for artwork trading while increasing the inflow of investment funds into the art market and also expanding them further.

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