Sotheby’s added a secondary marketplace to its web3-focused business Sotheby’s Metavers.
The auction house has been aggressively courting the NFT space since early 2021, positioning itself as the go-to place to sell and collect top-notch digital works. Sotheby’s organized historic NFT sales of solo artists, as Pack; organized group exhibitions, more recently a survey of contemporaries glitch art; and whipped collections, including the bankrupt hedge fund’s upcoming NFT sale Capital of the Three Arrows.
And it works. To date, Sotheby’s has generated over $100 million in NFT sales.
The latest move is a game to compete with other secondary markets and gain more Web3 credit from collectors and artists. The sales system is fully on-chain, allowing users to buy instantly in Ethereum or Polygon Matic with an infrastructure powered by Mojito, a Web3 platform Sotheby’s backed in 2021.
The platform is artist-centric. Every few months, Sotheby’s will offer an artist tour, the background, technique and importance of which will be explained in detail in typical auction house fashion. Users will have access to the complete portfolio of works made by an artist on other NFT marketplaces. It is a kind of aggregator, allowing holders of works by selected artists to add their NFTs to the platform without consulting Sotheby’s. It’s peer-to-peer, but with Sotheby’s setting the conversation topics. The auction house will charge a 2.5% auction fee.
Sarah Zucker, Mrs Cake (2021). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Sotheby’s Marketplace is also notable for its stance on royalties. As the number of NFT marketplaces proliferated and the crypto bear market deepened, a race to the bottom ensued with companies like Magic Eden and LooksRare switching to royalty-optional models. Some have removed them entirely. Guaranteed artist royalties were the big (false) promise of NFTs and Sotheby’s commitment to automatically pay artists based on their on-chain royalty rate will make it an attractive platform for artists.
Sotheby’s has launched its secondary market with 13 of the most prominent creators in the digital art space. This includes AI art stars Claire Silver, Sofia Crespo and Refik Anadol, generative artists Tyler Hobbs and Pindar van Arman, and leading digital creators Hackatao, IX Shells and XCOPY.
“A fully on-chain peer-to-peer marketplace is an important step in our evolution within the digital art and collecting space,” Michael Bouhanna, head of NFTs at Sotheby’s, said in a statement. “To commemorate this event by opening our secondary market to a carefully selected group of artists, many of whom have been at the forefront of the movement and brought digital art to the attention of the world, further emphasizes the Sotheby’s commitment to the NFT community.”
The next step will come in June with Sotheby’s Metaverse creating a digital gallery of secondary market works alongside digital art collector Cozomo De’ Medici.
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