Year-end Recap and Looking Forward
Our mission at MakersPlace is to build a vibrant future for digital creativity, by providing digital creators a platform to sell their art as a rare digital artwork, to collectors worldwide. In doing so, we offer digital artists a completely new revenue stream, which to many of our artists, has already proven to be more efficient and empowering that any model for selling their works.
2019 was an incredible year for MakersPlace and for the entire rare digital art community. We started with a bold mission and just a handful of equally bold digital artists who believed in this future. Artists like ArtWithFlo, Reinhard Schmid, Joe Chiappetta and a few others, provided the necessary support, patience and motivation to charge forward. 2019 was also a foundational year for MakersPlace as we invested in building a super-simple platform for artists to create and sell rare digital art, and an equally simple experience for collectors to discover and collect this new artistic medium. This proved to be a key turning point as it allowed us to end the year with a vibrant and fast-growing community, facilitating thousands of sales while connecting collectors with the digital works of the world’s leading artists.
Here are some of the highlights over the past year:
- Grew our community of artists from less than 100 members to over 1500+ — a testament to the simplicity of our platform.
- Launched and built a premier marketplace and community to discover and collect rare digital art — officially launching in April 2019. Today we offer over 15K+ rare digital artworks to discover and collect from.
- Announced our commitment to authenticating and verifying every artist on MakersPlace, with the launch of our identity management platform.
- Launched support for credit card and PayPal payments, facilitating both artists and collectors who aren’t yet familiar with cryptocurrencies.
- We became more social, allowing for collectors and artists to better connect and interact through liking, commenting and following.
- Facilitated our highest sale of a single rare digital artwork by Franco Verrascina for 10ETH ($1,450).
What’s most exciting is seeing artists spending more time creating, upon finally finding an avenue to express and sell their digital creativity.
Looking forward, our goal this year is to continue to make rare digital art, fun, easy and accessible for the millions of digital artists and collectors worldwide. For that to happen, here are the three major areas we’ll be focusing on:
- More tools for Artists. MakersPlace has always been rooted in helping artists and this year won’t be any different. We’ll be providing even more tools and capabilities for artists to promote, showcase and sell their works in both a physical venue as well as in digital spaces, like VR. We’re also excited to help artists capture even more value from their artwork, such as artist royalties and improved collaboration tools.
- Utility for Collectors. We understand that collectors want more ways to showcase and display their artworks in public and personal spaces. We’re excited to be making it easy to do this directly within the MakersPlace experience with our new Gallery View and more. Beyond that we’ll be offering more ways to experience your collections in both physical and virtual spaces.
- Curation. Today we feature over 15K+ artworks from thousands of artists, and we only expect our community to grow. We believe in creating a platform where you can easily self-curate and discover and collect the art that you’re interested in. To accomplish this, we’ve provided controls such as following and employed recommendation systems. However, manual curation when done right can be extremely valuable in helping artists gain the right exposure and helping collectors discover new works — which is what we’ll be investing in. We also expect to take an open and decentralized approach to curation.
Last year we built the foundation for rare digital art and this year our goal is to take rare digital art mainstream. From the entire team here at MakersPlace, we’d like to say thank you to all the members of our community for your continued support and motivation. Let’s make history together.
Get in Touch
If you’re a digital creator, you can learn more about MakersPlace here.
Will you be in the San Francisco Bay Area on the evening of January 18th? Come see us in person at the Pancakes & Booze Oakland pop-up art show!
If you think there’s an opportunity to collaborate, we’d also love to hear from you. You can reach us at hello@makersplace.com or on our Discord channel.
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