London Art Empire Meets Cryptocurrency
After all the depressing talk about forking and hacking, I want to talk about the brighter side of crypto and blockchain.
Ever since the birth of Bitcoin, the art industry has always been around as they were fascinated with the currency’s features: instant, anonymous, low fees. Once the Blockchain technology was fully realized for its potentials, the art industry decided to stay around even closer as with copyright issues and keeping records of all art-piece related transactions.
With the global art market valued at around $60 billion USD and high average amounts of purchase, the benefits of utilizing cryptocurrency as an additional payment form becomes obvious. Various artists and galleries at London’s Cork Street are increasingly accepting cryptocurrency payments in a bid to innovate their art empire.
BBC has reported one such instance on Tuesday as they stated that Dadiani Fine Arts, an art gallery located at London’s Cork Street, has begun accepting cryptocurrency as a payment form in what its owner describes as an “intuitive” decision.
The art gallery’s decision to accept cryptocurrencies is in fact, not a demand-driven decision to merely satisfy customer needs. Elena Dadiani, the owner of the gallery told BBC that this decision was in fact an intuitive move “…based on the way things are going”. This can be linked to the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies as various industries realize the true potentials of cryptocurrencies and their Blockchain based technologies.
Dadiani Fine Arts Gallery currently accepts Bitcoin and is planning on accepting Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Dash, Litecoin, and Monero in the near future. Dadiani says the Blockchain is the biggest thing to her ever since she learned about the Internet.
The art industry is undergoing a dynamic and rapid change just like the Blockchain. Recently, an online art marketplace named ‘Artsy’ successfully collected over $50 million USD during their funding round, a process similar to cryptocurrency ICOs. Many investors and financial advisors were suspicious about the funding round in a manner ultimately similar to recent Ethereum-based ICOs as with the unknown actual valuation of the company.
Regardless of their suspicions, these companies and platforms are successfully gathering funds to forward their research and development plans. These are indeed the ‘gray market’. The matter of the fact is that the $60 billion art market is increasingly utilizing cryptocurrencies and realizing their full potentials – partly for Blockchain’s dual ability to “establish the provenance of works of art and thereby reduce the reliance on brokers and other middlemen”, as reported by BBC.
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