October 18, 2017 – ARTEX, the world’s first decentralized provenance platform, announces the start of a token presale campaign. Through the whole crowdsale campaign project team aims to collect a soft cap of $5,000,000 and $15,000,000 of maximum funding.
ARTEX offers reliable and convenient platform for art market with fraud-proof provenance and transactions, copyright protection and beneficial community for experts, artists and market facilities. The project will offer safe verification of every subject and art object by the expert community on the basis of 35awards – one of the largest photo awards in the world. In 2016, 75 000 people uploaded 200 000 photos to this site.
ARTEX will establish the blockchain based historical record of art objects (provenance), both digital images, and items of cultural and historical importance. It will unite dealers, galleries, art critics, photographers, collectors, investors, and exhibitors on a single platform. ARTEX will offer two basic services: restriction of unauthorized printing of digital photos; authentication and sale of artwork. It will provide an aggregated record of each artwork transaction, create blockchain-based register for the authentication of artwork, secure transactions, copyright protection and monetization of expertise among the art community.
The project was founded by Vladimir Povshenko (CEO), one of the leading figures in the Russian photo market, the owner of the «Russian photo» magazine, Vladimir has wide portfolio of more than 100 conducted events – from seminars and exhibitions to the “The Photographer’s Day” festival, with more than 20,000 attendees; Valeriy Kochergin (CTO), the creator of 35photo.ru, the largest professional photography social network and the founder of 35awards, the world‘s second largest photo competition; and Evgeniy Galiakhmetov (CFO), a blockchain investor with 13 years of banking experience in managing positions.
Funding of the project will be carried out using a crowdsale held inside a Smart-Contract based Ethereum ecosystem. Token sale will be launched at 8th of November 2017 and will last for 30 days.
Presale with beneficial conditions is currently on-going and will continue until November 27. The token emission will be limited to $900,000 (hard cap) with the fixed price $10 for 125 Art Tokens. Main token sale will be from December 5 until 25 and token price will be $10 = 100 – 120 Art Token. The purchase is made by transferring the Ether to the address of the Smart Contract.
“ARTEX forms an ecosystem that will attract new players to the art market along with providing the security and transparency of transactions, copyright and art objects credentials. It will lower the threshold of entry by opening trusted access to all necessary insights and tools for wise investing and art experience monetization,” said Vladimir Povshenko, CEO and co-founder of ARTEX.
ARTEX ecosystem propose three tokens for inner transactions:
The Art Token is the main method of payment, it allows:
- Photos pre-moderation
- Cost of a photo estimation
- Experts’ work payment
- Print lab verification
- Printing services payment
- Escrow services payment
- Gallery verification
- Picture token issue
- System change voting
- Work of art purchase
The first version of the platform is being released online for testing. It features two simulators targeted to investors and photographers. With the MVP now available, any art market player will be able to receive a certain amount of test ARTEX tokens (ART-tokens) which they can use to purchase an artwork, whilst photographers are able to upload their assets to the database which initially will be estimated by a group of art experts, providing the photographer an ability to offer it on sale.
Arbitration system will guarantee the fulfillment of the terms of the transaction between the customer and the executor by engaging randomly chosen arbiters. Each arbiter states independent decision and the overall outcome is based on the arbiter’s individual rating and the majority of voices. The cost of arbitration will be determined by the amount of the transaction.
The project roadmap has four stages and timeline exceeding 2021. First step will be finished by the end of 2018 with the development of project infrastructure and inclusion of the initial batch of artists, experts, and contributors. Second step will end by the end of Q3 2019 by enabling the photo lab printing, verification of new photo labs and implementing the mechanisms of safe deal and arbitration. Third stage will be finished by the end of 2020 with attraction of major art galleries and art historians, digitization of famous paintings and internal token sale system finalization. The last stage assumes the platform is scaled out to other adjacent art areas, e.g. coins, jewelry and antique cars.
