Announcing Gallery: A NFT system for exclusive, uncopyable digital art
What is Gallery?
Artists have been making digital art for generations. But despite the amazing creative possibilities that digital art enables, it hasn’t yet been accepted by the mainstream fine art world.
This is because of the duplication problem. A work of digital art is just an image file, and an image file can be copied by whoever has it as many times as they want.
Most fine art draws its value from being the exclusive property of its owner — what we call the ‘exclusivity premium’. Because of the duplication problem, digital art can’t be the exclusive property of anyone, and so it hasn’t been able to break through to the mainstream of the fine art world.
Non fungible token technology represents the first real opportunity to make digital art rare and valuable. Recent projects like Crypto Kitties proved that there is tangible demand for digital collectibles.
Gallery isn’t the first project to make a non fungible token that represents ownership of a work of digital art. But we are the first ones to include a key new aspect:
We don’t let users owners download or access image files.
Because users can’t get a clean copy of image files, they can’t duplicate them. This is what ensures the non fungible token represents true, exclusive ownership of a work of digital art.
We solve the problem that kept digital art from going mainstream in the first place.
How does it work?
We accomplish this by combining non fungible token technology with a dedicated hardware viewing system. Users buy a token, called a Crypto Painting, and can then view and display their art on our hardware system.
When viewing them online, the Crypto Painting token will display a worthless, watermarked version of a work of art. Only the owner of the Crypto Painting token will be able to view and display the work of art that token represents ownership of by looking at it on their smart canvas.
We will introduce multiple smart canvases that collectors will be able to hang on their wall. The smart canvas system has the added benefit of solving another problem with digital art, which is the lack of standardization in how it is displayed.
We will also introduce a version that runs on an iOS device to make the Gallery platform as accessible as possible. Because this is not the ideal user experience, some artist might chose to not make their art viewable on the iOS smart canvas.
Our goal is to help digital art realize its potential as a medium and break into the mainstream of the fine art world, and to give artists another platform to create and distribute their work.
Helping artists is at the core of our mission, which is why anytime a Crypto Painting token is bought, the artist who created it will receive a percent of the sale price. Imagine if Picasso’s family got a royalty every time his work was auctioned.
Digital art has already unleashed a wave of creativity in the artistic community. But the creative possibilities it allows for have only barely been explored. Video art, programmatic art, interactive art, art that customizes itself based on who owns it — all incredible possibilities that we will help artists unlock.
The amount of amazing art in the world that has been lost or destroyed is painful to think about. Crypto Paintings will never be lost, never be destroyed and will never be faked. The Gallery system means that art can be enjoyed exactly as the artist intended 10,000 years in the future.
We are incredibly excited to work at the intersection of fine art and the non fungible token world as we create the future of art.
Our core mission is to help artists unlock their creative potential and be properly rewarded for the amazing work they do.
Join us as we work towards this goal!
-Duncan and Saahith
We will launch a beta version of Gallery in Summer of 2018
Visit our website
Check out our white paper
Special thanks to Eitan Barokas for providing the example art. Check out his website ArtByEitan.com
