KnownOrigin update — November 2019
New features, mainstream cryptoart exposure, increasing volumes in the market and the world takes a closer look
November has seen a busy set of updates to KnownOrigin, with a general aim to polish some under loved areas of the platform and a focus on how to expose more of the artwork to collectors and visitors alike.
We have also kicked off work on two large features which should hopefully enable more collaboration on the platform and expose new types of artwork to collectors and users of the site.
In the month of November we have onboarded more than 170 artists since KO inception, over $5500 💸 in sales revenue generated and 275 editions created for the month 🎨.
Not only this, there has been some great cryptoart exposure in the form of DADA (@PowerDada) and SuperRare at the TATE. Showcasing some amazing talent and grabbing some quality exposure from the wider arts world. Check out the live stream here.
Lets kick off with a quick recap on platform updates…
Activity changes
We started trialing splitting up a single activity feed into different streams of activity including Creations, Sales, Offers and All. As well as designing these streams to expose more useful information to the consumers of this data. There’s more work to do in this area but seems to be going well from initial feedback.
Self-service modernisation
We’ve not really given this area any love since its first inception nearly 8 months previous, and having been used to create over 1200+ multi-edition artworks, it’s time was up!
We have attempted to provide a cleaner and more usable set of features, also giving us more wiggle room for some up and coming changes to this area in the not to distant future. Additionally we have put more emphasis on artists accepting confirmation about forgeries and possible copyright issues which have come to light in recent weeks in the space.
The final change to this area come after a few backend improvements and internal testing we have made a modest file size increased to 35mb per edition. In our opinon there exists a balancing act between being able to capture the true beauty of an artworks assets, along with clarity of expression from the creator, portability and performance. We hope to increase this again after we understand how well these changes settle in.
Better notifications
This month we rolled out BlockNative’s notify.js solution, replacing our internally built solution which was aging and quite frankly worse. We think and hope the improved feedback mechanisms will help collectors and artists understand transactionality as they interact with the blockchain through KnownOrigin.
Etherscan images
KnownOrigin now supports showing the artwork images directly on Etherscan, this should hopefully help those buying to more easily verify artwork. A nice edition bringing the artwork directly to the bare metal of the blockchain on the most popular and familiar block explorer of Ethereum.
ENS Support
ENS represents a step forward in ease of use to blockchain application, normalizing ETH address to a more human readable form.
All addresses listed on KO now fully support ENS, bringing to life some of the creators and collectors to show the resolved ENS names. We have managed to listed ourselves as on the official site to show support for this great feature of Ethereum ecosystem. https://ens.domains/
This wraps up novembers noticeable platform changes, watch out for more changes hoping to go live during December as we iterate and tweak the marketplace, get in touch if you want to help or have ideas you’d like us to consider.
Next take a quick look over the last month at some of the more noticeable highlights highlighted here at KO HQ.
🌸 DAO Osaka SELLS OUT 🌸
Our first deepdive in the world of decentralised autonomous organisations, better known as DAOs. DAO Osaka was spawned as an experiment to crowd sauce the creation art with the aim to raise a small profit for those backing the project.
This month all editions sold out, generating a total revenue of approximately $1400 dollars from a commissioned $900 in the form of 8 editions. A small but tidy profit for those involved and fundamentally proving out a model which is more valuable to the market in the long term.
Cryptoart forgeries
Copies, forgeries and fakes are not new in the artwork and just as tokenisation brings benefits of portability, ownership and additional revenue streams unfortunately putting them on “the blockchain” it does not prevent such problems arising.
However, saying that we think blockchains can bring a better level of verification and validation, its simply a case of educating collectors and building some tooling to help highlight and quickly verify artworks.
Recently some very well known artists have highlighted this as a problem in the tweet below.
A few things we have recently done to help improve this are:
- Ensure that all newly created editions on KnownOrigin explicitly state confirmation of originality, copyright and single source of sale.
- Enabling images on etherescan allowing users to view raw blockchain transactions for KO and see the underlying asset itself.
- Surfacing more information on our activity to show browsers as much detail as possible.
There is plenty more work to do in this area with new tools and checks to be put in place but as a community this is something I think can be resolved between everyone.
KnowOrigin Swag
In a short period of time David moore (aka Selfmadeheroes) knocked up a swag store to have some fun and test the appetite for KO swag.
https://gendoato.squarespace.com/ <- check it out…
Several orders coming in and ourself getting far to giddy over the merch, hopefully we will see more of this in the future if time permits.
Thats all for the monthly update, 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… ❤️
James and the KO crew
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