Sascha Bailey - Blockchain Art Exchange - Ethereum London Keynote - #ethldn

[Music] home my name is Sasha Bailey have been working with emerging artists and established artists for last eight years works with over 20 artists ten of which who I work with quite closely curious about fifteen shows in the UK and Tokyo whose the last year I've been working on a project called blockchain art exchange and what this project aims to do is bring forth better autonomy for all artists utilising the etherion blockchain and go train technology so first of all what I crypto collectibles we've heard a little bit this night already but in the world we essentially have two types of assets we've got fungible and non fungible fungible being US dollars Bitcoin etherium non fungible being things like classic cars titles to houses and artwork over the last 60 years since the kind of digital revolution arts been on the fence between tangible and intangible and it hasn't really had a truly compelling means of exchanging it in the intangible realm so how does actually crypto art work so there's four major parts that go into crypto are and there's a little bit of a misconception of how much of NF T's are actually on the blockchain so first of all of course we have a ball chain itself which is registry it tells us where things are how much they cost where they're going next why they cost that much etc then we've got a server which is actually to store the large files themselves moving towards a distributed service like the IP FS is the end goal but we currently use AWS for latency and security concerns then you've got web free browsers a lot of you will be familiar with this sort of stuff so meta masks trust wallet that's the thing that actually allows you to interact with the smart contracts on the web sites and finally there's something that isn't talked about very much which is a token URI and this has become the industry standard for displaying metadata on websites using the blockchain so what this essentially is is a URL this input the token that when called returns a JSON blow of information that gives you your image name description etc so what is it actually solving for artists right now first of all it reduces marginal cost this is because it's simply you're just uploading to the blockchain you only need the image that you've already created and you're good to go you don't have transport you don't have insurance you don't have any of those things to worry about secondly it introduces new demographic and what I mean by this is it allows artists to reach directly with consumers rather than hitting the filter of gallerists dealers and critics it sorts out the means of exchange this especially affects video artists at the moment if you buy a piece of video work more than likely you'll receive it on a disk or a USB stick and it will come along with the contracts and make you promise you will not copy this then that's not so much of a problem the first time you buy it it becomes a problem when you try and resell it on to someone else because you'll have a hard time promising someone that you haven't copied this onto a disc or burnt it before selling it on it also allows us to create interesting ways of creating royalties a lot of platforms do this in all different ways but it allows us to hardwire this into the way that arts is transacted there is actually a European law that enforces they're supposed to be royalties paid back to artists but pretty much the only country that really does it as Germany then finally it secures local IP which is just a piece of distributed ledger technology kind of what it does once you've uploaded it there you've obviously time-stamped it as your creation and as I said the artists are really being affected by this in a positive way right now are the ones who work in a digital space already and that brings me from the next slide so one of the problems that Photoshop artists always kind of encounter is working with in different light spectrums so within RGB which is trifid Lee what you create on the screen you've got a much wider spectrum than CMYK which is what you typically printed so when you're asked when an artist goes to take their work from RGB to CMYK they're losing a lot of vibrancy and a lot of artists don't like this they're confused as to why their print doesn't look the same on the screen as it does in real life so all of this leads us to we've got fantastic new ways of interacting with digital art which amounts to really a new industry stack so we've got things like AR it's hard pressed to find an AR demonstration from Microsoft which doesn't contain some form digital ah well inside this we've got projects like crypto voxels in the central and creating VR experiences which really give us a compelling look into how social media might look in the future and how we might interact with each other in a 3d space finally there's the Samson art screen TVs which almost just feted Li kind of came out at the same time as the crypto collectibles market and then finally third-party exchanges which are really important because the magic in this new industry isn't the fact that you can buy digital art and own it on our platform it's the fact that you can take it and sell it wherever you want it's really yours it provides true buyer autonomy in effect that you can take it like a real artwork and sell it to whoever you wish so offering new generation now this is an artist who we began we found and worked with it's an Indonesian artist could Leonardo Vincent and what's really interesting about this is normally when I was trying to work with new artists to rediscover I've got to call them I've got to get stuff shipped over I've got to get stuff princess and there's a lot of marginal cost involved however now we can we could send a few and mouse and we can be working together in a matter of minute so this artist actually created that work which i think is quite interesting is a rendition of the recent online battle that difference between PewDiePie and t-series t-series was going to be the first call for a well PewDiePie was gonna be the first individual to make it to 100 million t-series was gonna beat him the last minute Elon Musk came on to his show and essentially figuratively lifting him up in subscribers so this is a work that was created for that as bizarre as it may sound a really thing that it has quite a lot of cultural relevance as art should that variation play so all of this amounts of growing better artists autonomy now when we look at the different industries which all really heavily rely on artistic input individually they're quite small but when we look at it all together if artists can grow on access and move between with clear licensing and easy ways then they get access to a 700 billion dollar market now to give an example of how this might work is imagine you have a clothing designer who's a student they come along and they upload a group of their designs to the blockchain to our to our exchange then you have another company a video game company who's looking for clothing for their characters to wear they discover this and that interaction couldn't have happened unless they have this centralized place where they can all explore they discover this clothing designer and they decide that they want to use that are in their game for their for their creations now this can happen in both ways and it's not just the only example I mean you can apply this to jewelry designers and painters the other interesting thing that we solve in this industry and we can work towards solving is the two different types of artists earning different amounts so if you go towards concept art you have you can earn a decent living as you usually receive a wage but you won't be able to ever privately sell your work and if you're a painter you generally only privately sell your work and the payment isn't so regular it's here and there whenever you can sell something so with this platform we can allow people to cross industries rather than having to specialize in one field of art they can move between the two and they have access to all of them so this brings me into here which is this an artist which we were working with called zarlinh up she traditionally produces concept art and hadn't thought about doing much fine art but as we work together and as we kind of push her in the direction of we can use this platform you really have the freedom to do what you want the work produced is really interesting and quite compelling from someone who comes from a very you do what I say sort of background so what now getting onto actually our project so what makes the BAE different from other art projects in the industry well first of all we're an archive all of the art on our platform is treated as an archive we have a dish standard process which I'll go through which essentially is a grading process for digital art and objective values we've got an algorithm which helps decide us excuse me starts us right a starting price but as we moved into a project we decided that this would be an optional thing rather than something we forced on people because people don't tend to like that finally we've got a royalties fee which comes into token economy so the way our royal cc's works is you're rewarded the more you sell on the platform so the more you sell with us the more money you'll receive and this is taken from percentage of the sales and what we want to do with this eventually and what we can do with this is use this to slowly move the blockchain art exchange towards a da da oh so this is the process that we kind of know we're quite familiar with so far we get up to the point that we're logging the creation on the e4 blockchain and the two photosystems I'm gonna go into today is our digital standard and then our sales process I'm not going to talk about licensing because I don't really have enough time I think sales is a little bit more interesting like there too so first of all our standard and where we got the inspiration from something you'll notice about non fungible real-world items is they all have attributes like this I mean diamonds is obviously one of the most extreme examples but physical art has condition reports and provenance reports classic cars have problems so a condition report so we got a team of experts together with 10 years in the fields knowing how to scan how to great videos knowing really what makes something objectively good when we created something we call the BAE standard so so one of the major problems and this goes back to the RGB RGB slide that was talking about before is if someone sends me an artwork from around the world and I've never seen it in person how do I know that it's the right color and this is actually kind of a problem if you're going to be scanning physical artwork and archiving it so after we tried a few different things tried to get printers to print the exact same shade of a color that's never gonna happen we eventually settled on something called a gray card which is generally used in photography to calibrate cameras but can also be used as a reference point everyone knows it's the same color because that's in the end what we need to do we need to identify something objectively that's the same no matter what so after we know that this is car archive this is the same color this by the way this is all done manually right now we are building a data set so that we can start and allowing computers to automate this but we need to build that up first so it's gonna be a manual process for a while so after we grade it we have a look at the artworks dpi or PPI and now this is relative to the actual size the artwork is originally is originally in this case the artwork has over 600 which is generally pretty good so we'd give that an eighth grade then finally the file type is checked and this is super important because you don't want an archive of something like a JPEG because every time you resave a JPEG you lose a little bit of quality so we went for Tiff's or bitmaps are generally the best quality for archiving artwork there are other options but we didn't really look into vector files it wasn't something interesting from our perspective so finally that goes into a stiff coat of authenticity which is great and then there's one other piece on here that you might notice which is prints this essentially is a way of tracking the prints created from a digital item in the physical world so it's almost like a reverse auditioning thing so just very quickly our token economy and sales process just give you a rebreathe overview of how this works so someone would upload the artworks of BAE what happens there in the first time the first time is sales this artist who sold it is rewarded with a small amount animation what's a small amount of BAE tokens and also of course the etherium from the sale but every time something sorts the BAE token holders receive a small amount of theory the only way to become a BAE token holder to sell on the platform this prevents people from monopolizing the tokens or trying to buy into early and prevents whale-like activities or at least helps dabrander so again resellers and dealers can also NBA e tokens by reselling the artwork so these are kind of this is like the sectors of neo art it's like a venture I did have kind of all of the research I put together of pretty much everyone in the space I don't call it crypto art simply because there is a couple of projects here which actually aren't blockchain related at all everyone kind of started out in one of these circles and slowly move towards another and that's what this is kind of showing is that no one really knows what this industry is going to be yet it's evolving constantly and it's changing so thank you so much for listening I've been Sasha Bailey I hope that I gave you a good understanding of what we do we're digital art is and why digital are kind of important for in general there's a QR code up there right now which will take you directly to our storefront I think yet please let me know if you have any questions [Applause] anyone yes it is but it doesn't really in hold intrinsic value of it's more just like a marker of how much each person holds so we could use it for voting systems we could use it for that but at the moment it's really just a marker of how many artworks you've sold essentially Department I love you so what what are you doing about how are you contacting all those what we do the tree or these but you don't want to be Nexus anything from sensitive areas like a music industry which was to a bellyful yeah talk to us and why yeah how we ended up between two stage okay definitely and the first question was what are we doing to kind of push adoption how are we doing that so we're pushing the angle of it basically I don't believe that the technology is really what's gonna sell this I don't really think the platforms are what's gonna sell it in the end it's gonna be the artists so what I do is I work closely with artists that's what I've always done so my goal is to push it forward through them so I think that when someone starts using this technology for really compelling and amazing things and obviously there's all these great things that it does but when someone really starts utilizing that and gets into it I think that's when we start to see things happen it's it's it's about it's about the creators rather than what we've created essentially and then what sorry what was the second part of your question the adoption so again it's I feel like it's it's getting a write artists for the right groups who are interested in this building up influence the spheres building up people who want to talk about it and want to get involved digital art and it's it you're right it's an incredibly difficult and boring process because we're not only onboarding people to the platform and the concept we're also onboarding people to the artists themselves so that's why I think it's almost better like I said to kind of target through influencer groups such as artists like a ball of painters well the prices are somewhere and those guys understand at work I just don't got them at home I don't know what they work yeah so how can you change that and how do you bridge the gap as well so we don't actually watch a nice change we don't actually work with Biz Clark that all that much like I mean I do personally but the platform's very much focused on digital only so one of the great things about using you know blockchain with purely digital stuff is there's not any input for humans so it's always on that there's there's no choice but the Providence to be trapped so I think that's what you're asking just how do you make sure that you keep a record right so that sometimes contains historic sale prices but it's usually produced by somebody as part of a PhD in researching the history of their asset and becomes sort of go-to body an authority on whether those works are authentic and whether they're actually by that artist and so normally in a self process one would consult the catalog resume normally by our dealer most people don't do that themselves but that is what provides you with information you can use and that's normally done in conjunction with a number of online databases which have historic sales prices of comparable artworks and artists that you can sort of triangulate this is how today's industry got together to create this business process in order to create market now back at you I think in the digital world like I said I mean the fact is you don't really necessarily need that book when literally everything is on the blockchain because you can look back and you can actually see the transactions from that moment that that ditional artwork when on there prior to actually block chaining it that's something else but we're generally talking about contemporary art that's been made now with our platform it's not so much about working out what someone's done before as in making sure that we go forward with this new process [Applause]