Blockchain.art: A BLOCKCHAIN GOVERNED BY THE ART INDUSTRY
Why is BCA building a blockchain for the art industry?
When I entered the blockchain community in 2018, NFTs were not yet part of popular culture. That changed overnight with the Beeple sale at Christie’s in March of 2020. Fast forward to now, and NFTs have become a buzzword, a multi-billion dollar industry, and are revolutionizing major brands across fashion, sports, and — of course — art.
It’s now clear that NFTs have a global cultural cache, hold increasing monetary value, and are practical in terms of digital ownership — but they are also, in essence, visionary.
When applied to an industry like the art market, NFTs can completely rewire the “establishment.” NFTs disintegrate geopolitical borders, and they allow currency to exchange immediately, peer-to-peer. An artist in Ghana can create and sell a digital work to a buyer in Sao Paulo without any proforma invoices, international shipping, or logistics of any kind. For a marketplace, such as the art world, which claims to be global — NFTs offer true liberation from political, financial, and logistical obstacles.
This is my vision for the future of the art market. Borderless, digital, transparent, and distributed. The dematerialized economy is becoming less abstract. Bits and bytes are the new asset class. Culture has already decided — the time to come “on chain” is now.
What is distributed governance?
Blockchain.art (BCA) is the first NFT marketplace intentionally built to empower the entire art world ecosystem — this includes artists, galleries, curators, museums, institutions, and artist estates/foundations. Each of the stakeholders above will have the ability to contribute to the governance of BCA’s evolution — as a community and as a marketplace.
Stakeholders can apply to run a node, thereby becoming BCA ‘validators’. This network of BCA validator nodes will ultimately reflect the complex relationships that generate consensus — and thereby value — in the established art market.
The BCA blockchain is being built on the Polkadot Network, which uses a proof-of-stake protocol and provides a host of benefits in terms of security, environmental-friendliness, and interoperability. The BCA closed beta is built on RMRK.app, an NFT platform on the Kusama Network, a parachain of the Polkadot ecosystem.
As BCA’s governance is opened to the art industry’s stakeholders — artists, galleries, museums, and institutions — all will have the option to manage BCA’s technical infrastructure by running validator nodes using their own hardware, with software provided by BCA.
Running a node can also have a monetary benefit for validators. A node validates transactions with an underlying value — nodes can receive a fee to validate the transaction(s). The more nodes a chain has, the more decentralized it is, and therefore the more sustainable. By opening BCA governance to vetted industry stakeholders, the data’s longevity on-chain is reinforced — for the sake of the transaction entries, the network’s participants, and the BCA network’s security.
Running a node will not require any heavy-lifting. Rather, it will initiate more participants into the BCA Marketplace by providing direct access to the development of the BCA ecosystem as a whole. We believe this will help foster the growth of the digital art market while adapting faster to its needs.
The BCA chain will enable other start-ups and businesses in the art market to build on top of the chain and develop new services that cater to the art industry. In addition, the BCA chain can connect to the Polkadot network and be compatible with other parachains. This will further customize the BCA chain and enable it to meet the art community’s short- and long-term needs while enhancing user experience.
Why run a validator node:
- By running a validator node, the entity — be it a gallery, museum, artist, or curator — serves a vital role that ensures the network’s functionality, security, and availability.
- Galleries and other node-running participants ensure that the network is decentralized and therefore not dependent on any single participant — or group of participants.
- Running a validator node is a way to earn BCA tokens, allowing the operator to participate directly in the network’s governance, including future upgrades.
- Maintaining a node allows a gallery to offer network services to artists and collectors — without relying on a third party for network access.
Responsibilities of running a node:
- Participate in an introductory BCA workshop on how to run and maintain a node.
- Run the node using a cloud provider of your choice with node software provided by BCA.
- Monitor the node to ensure that critical processes are running as expected.
- Monitoring the node is not labor-intensive and does not require full-time staff. Daily time expectancy to maintain a node is approximately 1hour/day (with monitoring to be done by the IT staff of the gallery, institution, or by an external service provider, for example: https://bisontrails.co/delegate/)
BCA’s beta NFT marketplace is currently live. To apply to BCA as a gallery, please visit our website.
- Christina Steinbrecher-Pfandt, CEO Blockchain.art (BCA)
- Emilie Trice, Curatorial Advisor, Blockchain.art
