KnownOrigin update — June 3rd 2020

Monthly stats, improved sharing URLs, better artist tools and looking ahead to the future

James Morgan

Published in

KnownOrigin

6 min readJun 4, 2020

May stats

Sales — $36,000+ (170+ ETH) 💸
Top 5 sales are all VR based works🥇
Top sale of Spaced Painter & CryptoSpectr collab — a thrilling immersive VR work bought for 15.00 ETH($3210.90) by Museum of Crypto Art
370+ editions created ⏫
333 artists now onboard — over 35 added in May

An interest point to note is that the top 5 sales this month are all from immersive VR based artworks. We have always believed in the power of these spectacular and immersive pieces and this month we saw a massive signal in the same direction, well done to all those involved 👏!

This month we also saw our next Guest Editor, Jason Bailey, curating another selection of artworks. As we prep the next one if you would like to be part of this please do reach out, we’re always looking for new and exciting curators.

Finally, a quick update on total sales volumes — sales since KO inceptions this now stands at over 1359 ETH — tipping over $320,000 at the current price of ETH 😵.

For us these numbers still seem surreal 🤯, we hope that in this time we’ve helped many artists to monetise their amazing digital creations and that there is plenty more of this in the future. In general I still believe the space is fairly small and needs to grow much more, and the next 12 months we should see explosive growth in the whole NFT and digital arts scene as a whole.

So best belt up and prepare for the ride! 🚀

Feature updates

Secondary market discovery

We started of the month with the newly developed secondary market and spent the first part of May fixing bugs, adding features and a few extra tweaks such as enabling the current Gallery to filter on secondary and primary editions and making it easier to make an offer on any primary sold work.

Filter on primary and secondary editions — https://knownorigin.io/gallery?market=secondary

Easily make an offer on any token of an edition

These are only small and simple changes to hopefully enable easier discovery and provide better tooling for the sale on the secondary market.

In the meantime, we are working in stealth on a fresh discovery solution which will hopefully make finding and discovering artworks much better.

🔥Burn baby burn🔥

We also redesigned and enhanced the management tools for artists which now covers changing prices, gifting and transferring tokens, burning and reducing the supply of editions.

Burning is split into options — “complete burn” for editions with no sales, and “squash and burn” for partially sold editions. Squash only burns the remaining unsold supply.

As KO supports multiple editions we need to be careful about how burning any artworks is handled, we cant burn editions which have part sold as tokens have already been issued. Along with this it could incorrectly report stats about supply and rarity which we isn’t being fair on collectors.

All in all, this was previously a real pain point for artists, hopefully this closes the gap and gives more freedom and power to creatives on the platform.

One interesting feature which this could now enable, is that an artists can mint larger editions and then at a certain point of time burn the unsold supply in order to increase the scarcity, making those tokens already sold even more “rare” — maybe some artists may use this is a promotional and marketing tool.

As a side note, we have been asked by a few artists to add a feature which allows them to select the quantity to burn — this has been added to list and will be actioned at some point in the future.

User Collections

Since the start of this year we embarked on merging the concept of “artist” and “collector” profiles into a single place, this month we finally introduced what we have termed “collections” which is the last piece of the puzzle.

There is now no such thing as an artist page and a collect page — just a single place which houses all functionality, showing you the tools which you need. (Don’t worry, any old links still work, they are redirected to the new page)

All artist tools have been placed under a “Artworks” tab and sitting alongside a users “Collection” and any “Offers”.

Better profile URLs 🔗

Along with the profile changes we have introduced better profile URLs for all accounts on the platform.

Your username will now generate you a sharable link to your KO collection, for example to give you a flavour check out some links below

This has been a long requested feature so hopefully everyone likes it and enjoys better URL sharing with their followers on twitter and other platforms. So please update your social profiles to point to your KO profile URL!

That concludes an overview of the updates we have built and released in May.

Please do let us know what you think of the changes, it will help us understand where to focus our efforts ❤️

Looking ahead to a brighter future

In times of uncertainty the creativity train does not stop or sleep for anyone. Creators just want to create and many of them do regardless of their current situation. However, wider events taking place in the world will no doubt have an impact on our lives. 2020 so far has seen a spate of traumatic and unwanted events around the world.

Starting off the year we saw the Australian bush fires which decimated huge amounts of land and wildlife. A direct consequences of Global warming maybe, either way a shocking loss of habitat and life.

Then COVID-19 has and is killing thousands of people, bringing emotional and financial pain to many millions of us. A virus which does not discriminate meaning and has impacted many of us severely.

Now we are seeing huge unrest and uproar at the racial inequality and police brutality throughout the United States. With demonstrations happening worldwide as society tries to bring this plight to the forefront and stamp it out once and for all.

These events have deeply impacted our team, some directly. We struggle to know what to do to help, feeling powerless in most situations.

On a brighter note, the solidifying and emergence of a digital and remote economy which has bloomed from all this will drive the space forward no doubt. Hopefully opening new doors to previously unknown and emerging digital artists which can now promote and monetise their creations on sites like KnownOrigin.

Society as a whole looks to be taking action on world events and injustices going on, a promising sign that the status-quo will change and the needle is moved in the right direction.

We all hope the world settles down in the second half of the year and prosperity returns to many of those inadvertently impacted from what is going on.

Thanks for listening to my short musings and thoughts on the current situation, sometimes the only thing you can do it write down how you feel.

Thanks for reading!

Come join the telegram group and chat with other collectors and artists alike or follow us on twitter @KnownOrigin_io for more updates and collaborations.

Big love, stay safe, KO ☮️