KnownOrigin.io — from Alpha to Beta
KnownOrigin.io was bourne with a discussion around non-fungible assets and a niggling question:
“Can we use the power of the Blockchain to mint Digital Assets for artwork that evolves proof of ownership, provenance, and authenticity?”
We decided we wanted to try a prove this with the launch of our own ERC-721 Marketplace for digital assets.
The question above conceptualises where we started and some of our original goals but this soon morphed into something more substantial and as with all good hypothesises we ended up with more questions than answers.
Can we use Blockchain to provide proof-of-ownership of digital assets?
Ownership seems like a obvious fit for Blockchain technology but there are challenges in adoption, understanding, and acceptance.
Factor into this argument is that not all users are familiar with Blockchain and/or the crypto-ecosystem and how it actually works. It’s not the fact that the technology isn’t suitable to fulfil the question asked but that those that don’t already interact daily with Blockchain technology need to be educated on the merits and promises of a public self sovereign Blockchain such as Ethereum.
This is ongoing challenge for KnownOrigin and for anyone who is trying to bring non-blockchain enfranchised people into the space. We know this is an area for improvement and over the coming months you will see new sections on KnownOrigin which aim to help this on-boarding for both artists and collectors.
Can we use Blockchain to provide provenance of digital art?
At KnownOrigin we utilise the power of the Ethereum, its public and traceable nature along with the smart contracts to provide a trusted and secure way to ensure provenance or chain-of-custody is maintained for digital art which is sold on KnownOrigin.io.
Our ERC-721 compliant digital assets are stamped with immutable metadata, publicly declaring the art, artist, and associated properties, hosted decentrally via IPFS for all to see and view.
By following a standard we have interoperability, therefore you can then trade our assets on other 3rd party marketplaces places such as OpenSea and view your asset as collectables in Ethereum powered wallets such as TrustWallet.
Within our marketplace all assets are managed centrally and are purchased, traded and traced through our primary public, verified and open source KnownOrigin token smart contract, allowing anyone to see who owns a token and by looking through the transactions and history of a token you determine the provenance of a specific piece of digital art.
We are developing tools and activity streams which will allow you see the history of an asset and its purchases into KnownOrigin.
Can we use Blockchain to confirm authenticity of Digital Artworks?
This is a question of two halves, we use a stringent and diligent process which involves confirming the authenticity of a digital artwork when we onboard new artists. Secondly once we mint and seed the artwork into the main KnowOrigin smart contract we then fallback to use the power of smart contracts and the public Blockchain to provide the authenticity.
We also reference some public tools such as Etherscan to confirm a digital asset is valid, check who owns it, along with accessing its metadata which can then to be used to validate a piece of digital artwork is as expected.
Fakes are rife in the traditional physical art world but we believe that with public and verifiable smart contracts combined with the power of ERC-721 assets and the traceability of public blockchains such as Ethereum, we are one step closer to solving the age old provenance of art question.
Next steps
The above three questions summaries our original thoughts when building KnownOrigin.io, however this does not encapsulate the many challenges and unanswered questions we facing getting the product to the main network and the site in beta.
In the next blog in this series I will look deeper into these challenges and unanswered questions we now face at KnownOrigin hopefully have some answers to them.
Discover, buy and collect digital artwork by some of the worlds most respected artists, illustrators and creative practitioners.
BE ORIGINAL. BUY ORIGINAL.
To find out more about BlockRocket.tech (who developed KnownOrigin.io) follow @BlockRocketTech or get involved with our community group Blockchain Manchester at @blockchain_manc.
Visit knownorigin.io, join the telegram channel, follow us on twitter @knownorigin_io for further updates on our progress
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