KnownOrigin update — May 4th 2020

Monthly stats, secondary markets and improved offer flows

Before covering the updates we have started rolling out in the last few days, it’s worth cover some of the monthly key statistics from April along with various interesting tidbits.

April stats

• Primary sales — $38,000+ (213+ ETH) 💸
• Top sale — The Bull by Trevor Jones — $10,780 (55.55 ETH) 🥇
• 470+ editions created ⏫
• 610+ artworks sold 📈
• KO Second birthday and CV gallery opening 🍰
• Over 1000 ETH traded on KO since it’s inception! 😊

It’s been another eventful month for the community with some killer artwork and top sales figures, smashing all previous records on KO. I want to thank all collectors and artists who have supported KO’s continued growth in this nascent industry 🙏

As the onslaught of COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc socially, economically and emotionally around the world. Thankfully, a virus can not stop creativity and digital artwork continues to be created, viewed, and purchased.

March and April have seen big downturns in the traditional markets, countries around the world scrambling to work out what to do, yet we have seen no significant change in the number of new artworks being created in these same months. Not only this we have seen our best month ever in primary sales as well as footfall on the marketplace.

My point being that in times of reduced physical interaction the need and desire for a more focused digital world grows daily. Wether you think the social distancing measures introduced around the work are overblown or rightly enforced, there is no doubt in my mind that we are seeing a move further towards or internet first and digital first age. This can only fuel the continued growth of CryptoArt.

Now on the some cool new features!

Secondary sales & Artist royalties

KO is now 2 years old, and today we tentatively release the first iteration of our secondary sales offering. This includes paying royalties back to the original creatives behind each and every amazing piece of artwork listed on the site.

This feature has been requested and championed from the community in the last few months and we are now proud to be finally be supporting it.

We now have the technology which provides us transparency of transactions. It also enables, with smart contract code, an automatic royalty to be applied to all secondary sales. This technology is the key to achieving what has before been difficult, error-prone, and unwieldy. source; blackbox.art

KnownOrigin will now allow anyone to make to an offer on any artwork, inline with industry and community standards we will be allocating 10% of all secondary sales back to the original creator(s), this includes collabs which are split based on the original percentages specified at creation. This should hopefully further align further our small and fledgling industry onto the same path that everyone is willing and striving towards.

I think there is a fine line between encouraging collectors to use KO, which will apply these new rules, verse pushing collectors to sell artworks on other sites or using OTC trades to avoid the 10% patronage.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to enforce this universally across all platforms (yet), as we’ve written about before, but I am sure in the coming months and years new standards will emerge that can facilitate this, in the meantime we will be enforcing this when all items are resold directly on KnownOrigin.

We will be watching closely to see what happens on the secondary market in the coming weeks and months and will be reacting to feedback as it comes in.

How it works?

Every tokenised artwork now allows new prospective collectors to make an offer.

The potential new buyer can enter the amount they want to offer, sending to the money to be escrowed in the new smart contract. The current owner of the token can then accept and or reject the offer — providing a simple signalling mechanism for price discovery.

Accepting the offer transfers ownership of the token, allocating a portion of the sale to the creator(s) and paying a small platform fee, the seller taking the remainder of the escrowed funds. More info on fees be found here.

Rejecting the offer returns the money back to the prospective buyer and allows the current owner to signal what is not an acceptable price for re-sale.

We will also be sending out email alerts for each of these items if we have an email address on record for the seller, buyer and artists.

Much work has gone into building this feature, getting us to this stage will hopefully provide a good baseline from which to evolve.

Improving offers UX

As part of the work undertaken we have addresses a confusing and legacy part of the KO platform, offers!

Every account page now has a unified Offers tab which will show all active offers on newly created editions and collected artworks in their wallets, as well as all active offers they have placed. We have completely overhauled the system of offers and hope the newly improved flow will be welcomed by all.

Along with this change we have changed how users interact with the platform, using modals more extensively to focus on the underlying action in hand.

Thats a wrap

I hope everyone likes our first small steps into the secondary market, we’ve put lots and lots of effort into getting this feature over the line in the last few months.

Next we will be focusing on exploring additional artist verification steps, new auction mechanics as well as spend some time adding a few commonly requested small features from the community.

Please do let us know what you think and any feedback you have for us.

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

James (May the 4th be with you 🖖)