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Pinterest is a great place to find digital art, but a terrible place to sell it. The fact that everything online can be copied endlessly prevents artists from creating the feeling of scarcity necessary for their work to be perceived as having value. Yash Nelapati saw this fight closely as the first employee of Pinterest. He has now launched MakersPlace, where creators can generate a chain fingerprint for each of their works, proving the creator of it and allowing it to be sold as part of a limited edition .
Similar to Etsy, MakersPlace allows artists to sell their creations while the startup takes 15% off. Collectors receive a non-fungible cryptocurrency token indicating the ownership of a limited-edition digital copy of the artwork that they may store in their own crypto wallet or in the one from MakersPlace. The MakersPlace website is officially launched today, after a year of beta testing.
"At Pinterest, we found that millions of digital creators spent countless hours creating digital art works, but they struggled with fundamental elements such as attribution." Says Dannie Chu, co-founder of MakersPlace, who led Pinterest's growth engineering for six years. "Their work is printed, copied, shared and in the end, their upload brings them very little. If you can not create a sustainable model for digital creators, you will not have art. "
If the software eats art, Uncork Capital wants a place at the dinner table. He led a $ 2 million spin-off for MakersPlace, joined by Draper Dragon Fund and Abstract Ventures, as well as angels from Pinterest, Facebook, Zillow and Coinbase. They see in the encrypted digital photo and symbolized a rose sold a million dollars last year, as the beginning of a thriving market of blockchain art. "It was a good time for us. People value digital creations as physical creations, "says Chu.
Hiscox estimates that online art sales totaled $ 4.64 billion (although mostly offline traditional works) in 2018, while Art Basel estimated $ 67.4 billion of dollars the total sales of works of art for the year. MakersPlace could be well positioned, as more and more works of art are sold online and become more and more digital. "MakersPlace has already partnered with thousands of incredible digital artists selling their unique works, which testifies to the easy-to-use platform they've built," said Jeff Clavier, Associate director of Uncork. "They have also created a seamless and fun one-stop shop for the discovery and collection of digital artworks."
The technology of the startup is designed so that artists who use their fingerprints do not require a thorough experience of the blockchain. They simply download it on MakersPlace before sharing it elsewhere, verify their identity through an integration with Civic where they take a picture with their driver's license, and an Ethereum-based token is generated with the creator's name, the name of the creator. Art, its printing and editing. number and date. An Ethereum token name, an identifier, a contract identifier and a creator ID are all assigned. This results in a permanent record of the author.
Art collectors can browse MakersPlace's categories for animation, photography, drawings, pixel art and 3D creations; explore recent and popular downloads; or search by artist or specific work of art. They can buy art with a credit card or with Ether; use it, post it or distribute it for non-commercial purchases; or resell it on the secondary market. MakersPlace does not assume any property of the art that it hosts.
One of the main concerns is that artists unaware of the existence of MakersPlace could have their works fraudulently fingerprinted and attributed to a thief. Chu says that "we use a mixture of website, email and identity verification services (we use civic.com). This strongly discourages download and setting assignments for stolen digital creations. But you can still imagine the headache of less tech-savvy artists if their creative identity is hacked.
There are many other blockchain actors in the art world, from Blockchain Art Collective's NFC stickers for physical art recording to the ArtByte artists tilting platform. Many startups are trying to solve the problem of art attribution, including Monegraph, KnownOrigin, Bitmark, CodexProtocol, Artory and so on. MakersPlace will have to hope that its talent, funding Silicon Valley and the focus on digital works will make it stand out.
As we move to a culture where so much of our identity, from photographs to music, has become tirelessly replicable, the concept of possession has lost its meaning. Yet we are still in the depths of accumulators, afraid of not having enough. "Collecting is innate human behavior, but as people become more urban, mobile, and minimalistic, physical memories have become less appealing," Nelapati concludes. "Our mission is to create a platform that encourages creators by allowing them to take ownership of the work they produce."
[Featured Image: bunny style by Chocotoy]
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