For 25 years now, Artprice by Artmarket – world leader in art market information – has been studying, analyzing and researching the structure of the art market from every possible angle. This work has engaged all of its human and technical resources, including its art history department, its databases, its econometricians and statisticians, its sociologists, and of course its economists, jurists and tax specialists.
According to thierry Ehrmann, founder and CEO of the group, ‘Over the past five years, Artprice by Artmarket has literally second guessed the impact of NFTs on the art market by adding blockchain to its core database business and digitizing its historical art market standardization work. Artprice is the sole author of these projects with IP protection of its source codes since 1999’.
For its innovative R&D and its creation of Artpriceblockchain.com, Artmarket was awarded the prestigious state label “Innovative Enterprise” by the BPI (French public investment bank) in 2015 and then again in 2018 (it is rarely awarded more than once).
Artmarket.com is now setting its sights even higher as it launches its NFT ® Marketplace with a realistic ambition to generate a future turnover of several tens of millions of euros, and possibly even hundreds of millions in the longer term.
This ambition is based on the logic and reasoning explained below, which, on the one hand involves a specific and unique approach to Blockchain and NFTs, and on the other, relies on a historical, sociological and economic analysis of the art market.
Specific and unique approach to Blockchain and NFTs
In the design of its DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) Artmarket.com will produce ‘smart contracts’ registered on the Ethereum blockchain.
Today, Artmarket.com’s eco-responsibly designed DAO brings together the immutable and transparent rules governing the art market (one of the oldest market’s in the world) with total impartiality. Artprice has been scientifically codifying these rules for the last 25 years.
Artmarket.com’s DAO is transparent. It is de facto based on a supra-national framework and is the subject of contributions from the best historians, jurists, scientists and econometricians. These contributions have been collected over the past two decades to establish the company’s open data.
Artprice – world leader in art market information – has been the sole author of its databases for 25 years. Today, its databases are authoritative throughout the world and include the world’s largest documentary archive of notes, manuscripts and sales catalogs since 1700, which further guarantee the authenticity and historical legitimacy of its databases.
As a direct consequence of its reliability and its undisputed reputation in the art market, Artprice has the full capacity and is perfectly positioned to play the role of oracle (source of reliable information that allows the integration of variables from the real world into smart contracts) in Artmarket.com’s blockchain.
Artprice’s legitimacy as a blockchain oracle is based on its real-time collection of data from 6,300 auction houses around the world which automatically transfer their public auction results to Artprice.
Within Web 3.0 communities, an oracle can only be an oracle if it relies on a multitude of public sources, which is exactly what Artprice does with its 6,300 public sources.
As an oracle, Artprice will feed data from its databases. This data will include public auction results; historical, indexed and econometric data about artists and their works; detailed information concerning the traceability of works, etc.
As an oracle input, Artprice’s data will have the status of ‘recognized official market information’, and the activation or non-activation of ‘smart contracts’ will depend on the information provided by Artprice.
There is no doubt that Opensea and Rarible, to name but two, are among the NFT platforms that would immediately benefit from an industrial collaboration with Artmarket.com, the latter providing an indisputable, unavoidable and global art market reference going back a quarter of a century.
Artmarket.com will study each proposal, joint venture, capital participation, merger and/or acquisition and will give its approval if the proposals make good industrial sense and perpetuate its principal ethic: the promotion of art market information and transparency.
In view of the different legislation in force in France and, at a broader level, in Europe generally, Artmarket.com is looking into registering with the AMF as a Digital Assets Service Provider (DASP or PSAN in French) with a view to its forthcoming status as a FinTech company. At the same time, Artmarket.com will constantly monitor US and European legislation thereby allowing it and its American subsidiary to make the best choices as a future FinTech.