Launching Blockchain Art Market MakersPlace By Pinterest Employee

The Genesis Of MakersPlace

It comes to be a great place to find digital art whereas a terrible place to sell it as Pinterest has the fact tied to it that anything online is infinitely copyable making it tough for artists to establish a sense of scarcity necessary for their work to be perceived as valuable. Seeing this struggle, Yash Nelapati as Pinterest’s first employee has now started MakersPlace whereby creators can generate a blockchain fingerprint for each of their artworks proving that who made it and lets it be sold are as part of a limited edition. 

MakersPlace being similar to Etsy, therefore, allows artists to sell their creations as the startup takes a 15 percent cut as collectors receive a non-fungible cryptocurrency token with ownership of a limited edition digital print of the artwork they can store in their crypto wallet or one of MakersPlace as the site officially launches after a year of beta testing. It is here that MakersPlace cofounder Dannie Chu spending six years leading growth engineering at Pinterest explains that at Pinterest, they noticed that there come to be millions of digital creators spending countless hours creating digital artwork and thereafter struggling with basic things like attribution. It is their work that is getting printed, copied, shared, and ultimately making very little money from being put online as if they can’t create a sustainable model for digital creators to create then they are not going to have art. 

Artists And MakersPlace

As the saying goes, in case of software is eating art, then Uncork Capital will surely need a seat at the dinner table leading a $ 2 million seed round for MakersPlace joined by Draper Dragon Fund as also Abstract Ventures, plus angels from Pinterest, Facebook, Zillow, and Coinbase. They have observed the start of a thriving blockchain art market as they see the crypto tokenized digital photo of a rose that sold for $ 1 million explained by Chu that it was a light bulb moment for them where people are valuing digital creations like physical creations. 

In this context, Hiscox has estimated that there were around $ 4.64 billion in online art sales whereas compared to ArtBasels’s estimate is $ 67.4 billion in total art sales as MakersPlace is well-positioned as more art is sold online and more of it is becoming truly digital. As Uncork Managing Partner Jeff Clavier states, MakersPlace already partnered with thousands of incredible digital artists selling their unique artwork which is a testament to the easy-to-use platform they have built as also they have created a seamless and fun one-stop -shop discovering and collecting digital artwork. 

Designed in a way so artists fingerprinting their work doesn’t need extensive blockchain experience, the start-up’s technology needs just uploading it to MakersPlace before sharing it elsewhere verifying their identity through integration with Civic as it is where they take a photo holding their driver’s license as also an Ethereum based token generated with the creator's name, artist’s name and it’s impression as also edition number and the date. There’s a permanent record of authorship as an Ethereum token name, ID, contract ID and creator’s ID are all assigned to. 

Funding MakersPlace

Browsing MakersPlace categories for animation, photography, drawings, pixel art, and 3D creations, art collectors can explore recent and popular uploads searching by a specific artist or art piece where they can buy it with a credit card or Ether using, displaying, distributing it for non-commercial purchases reselling it on the secondary market where MakersPlace assumes no ownership of the art they host. Artists are unaware of MakersPlace which is one major concern that might have their works fraudulently fingerprinted and attributed to a thief whereas Chu says that they use a mix of website, email and identity verification services to do this which is a strong deterrent to uploading and establishing attribution for stolen digital creations as also they could still imagine why it is the headache for less tech-savvy artists as if their creative identity gets to be hijacked. With plenty of other blockchain entrants into the art world, from Blockchain Art Collective’s NFC stickers thereby registering physical art to artist tipping platform ArtByte as many start-ups are therefore trying to solve the art attribution problem. This includes Monegraph, KnowingOrigin, Bitmark, CodexProtocl, Artory and more as MakersPlace hopes its talent, Silicon Valley funding and focuses on digital works is differentiating it from the pack

The Final Words To Close The Discussion

From photographs to music as they move to a culture where there are so many things representing identity it has become endlessly replicable as the concepts of possession have thereafter lost its meaning with blockchain whereas they are still hoarders deep down, scared of not having enough. While Nelapati concludes collecting comes to be an innate human behavior while people become more urban, mobile, and minimalist, physical keepsakes have become less appealing. Therefore, their mission is to create a platform that incentivizes creators by giving them ownership over the work they produce.