Interview with Michael Cebo, Arteïa’s Strategic Business Advisor

Tell us about yourself and why you decided to support Arteïa as a business advisor?

I have worked in financial services for over 12 years and have spent time in business development broadly involved in financial market data, pricing and commercialization. I have worked in a role which originally resembled a startup atmosphere and have an interest in innovative early stage ventures. My experience working closely with founders and the excitement around growing promising businesses has drawn me to Arteïa. The most important criteria for me has been the identification of a team that is knowledgeable and passionate about a product and that the team has a specific pain point that has been personally experienced as a direct participant in the industry. I have always found the Art market to be fascinating from an outside perspective and feel that it shares some similarities with opaque, illiquid, and esoteric financial markets that I have studied. The Arteïa team has identified a pain point based on the teams’ unique inside view of an industry which is in need of modernization from a data perspective. I do believe that as token oriented businesses grow they will still need the traditional levels of business advice such as expansion/scaling strategies and general product advice even though value may accrue differently. I have chosen to be a strategic business advisor to Arteïa since I can hopefully assist with those matters.

What does the absence of intermediaries mean for the art market?

Intermediaries obviously do play an important role within the current construct and capture significant value. There is more value that can be captured by smaller participants such as collectors, galleries, and artists in this market with direct and fair exchange. Openness and more transparent price discovery can lead to the reduction of transaction costs. Currently information hoarding/asymmetries among intermediaries make the data discovery process around who owns what artwork, what art still exists, it’s condition etc., quite difficult to obtain. This increases the barriers for other new participants to enter the market and this diminishes the overall market potential. The traditional art sales/exchange process would benefit from distributed ledger technology and this should help to establish best practices based on trust for more participants in the art market leading to more price discovery and less overall opacity. It can create a more open art ecosystem versus the current centralized intermediary oriented art market.

Do you believe the token economy is the future of finance?

Only time will tell. I believe it certainly deserves attention and there is a role for the token economy as the underlying technology develops and as useful decentralized applications gain widespread adoption. There is still much experimentation and many unknown variables as tokens develop (regulatory landscape, lack of institutional players, lack of domain knowledge, asset volatility, etc.). Still we have seen the power of network effects in current platform type data models and a new breed of decentralized community models with network momentum powered by innovative tech have the potential to modernize traditional industries and lead to valuable protocols. The key will be to establish long term-oriented communities that gain utility from the protocols. Projects that create long term value will build architectures that fundamentally solve problems in unique ways that can’t be accomplished more efficiently without this technology.

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