Self-serve Tokenisation

Empowering artists and removing friction — from creation to tokenisation in a single blockchain transaction 🚀🎨

The background

For a long time we have had the desire to speed up the submission process for new artworks on the platform. We know this part of the process currently is one of our “room for improvement” areas and we know that you are only as strong as your weakest link. Today I would like to announce that we are opening our public beta for self-serve tokenisation on the KnownOrigin platform. Contract code is open source and viewable here.

Since Christmas this year we have been slowly and surely chipping away at this behind the scene, putting in place the necessary steps, learnings and technologies to allow artists on KnownOrigin to tokenise their own artworks. We have completely re-written the API, built new smart contracts which drive things like auctions and artist controls, done extensive research into image compression services and libraries as well as rebuilding our backend infrastructure to hopefully support the increase in demand. It’s been a long time coming but now I think we are ready to show this in public.

When we started out on this journey we never imagined that it would be received so positively and that we would have sold more than 1300 tokenised artworks in the first year and successfully on-boarded over 70 artists that have delivered NFTs into hundreds of users wallets. 👍

The Future

From this point onwards we will be switching the part of the tokenisation process into autonomous flow that will empower collectors and artists as more digital assets will be available (and quicker). This enable more creativity for artists as they can plan releases and generally be the master of their tokens. No longer will they need to wait days to tokenise their work as this can be done in a single transaction directly on the KnowOrigin site. The only prerequisite is that we onboard you as an artists and mint your first work manually — once you are enabled, and past this point, you can tokenise your own digital artwork 24/7.

The process

• As an artists — sign into MetaMask
• Visit your Artists profile page and you should see a new tab called Creation

• Navigate to this page and prepare to tokenise your artwork
• Give your creation a Name and a Description

• Set the Edition Size and Price for the artwork

• Add a series of Tags which represent you creation — these will appear on the site and will embedded in the IPFS data attached to your token. We have also pre-filled a set of tags which can be used if you want to.

• If you desire, Enable Auctions for users once its been tokenised vs only have a buy it now price.

• Finally Upload your Artwork image and begin the tokenisation process.

• Once all details are filled in and valid, the Add Artwork button will do blue and then its ready to go.

• Click this and MetaMask or the equivalent web3 provider should launch a transaction and ask you to sign it. This process is FREE — the only thing you pay for is the gas to mine the transaction on the blockchain.

Goodies & Gotchas

The good news is that all artworks tokenised via this method will be defaulted have a lower commission percentage mean that artists will keep 85% of all ETH raised from each sale. We will be monitoring this process and if possible bringing this down further in the future.

During the initial phases of this rollout we have added some basic sanity checks and restrictions to help to us monitor the impact and overall performance of the tool, these are as follows:

1. You can only tokenise a maximum of 2 pieces in a rolling 24hr window — any other transaction in this time will result in a failure.
2. The maximum edition size of 100 — if you need more that this please reach out to us.
3. Max file size if 25mb and you can only upload jpg, gif and png at first. We hope to increase file size and add more file formats in the future.
4. Rollout will be done piecemeal and we will be enabling artists access to this tool week by week.
5. If mistakes are made you will need to contact us and we discuss how best to rectify the scenario.

What’s next?

Once this is out there is still plenty to add to the platform; below are a few of the features we want to look at next:

• The ability to upload high-res assets for each tokenised piece.
• Better deeplinks into artworks so they include the image, artist and title in previews generated.
• Integration of more social features to enable artists and collectors to communicate more.

That’s a wrap for todays update and I hope you like what we’ve been busy beavering away at in the last few months. Please let us know any feedback you have on this new feature.

Start your digital art collection now! dapp.knownorigin.io

Come say “hello” on our telegram channel or twitter @knownorigin_io

Big love — KO Team

🎨 BE ORIGINAL. BUY ORIGINAL.

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