Art and Immutability
“Ars Longa, Vita Brevis.”
It must have been when I was back in middle school that my old art teacher rolled up his sleeve and I saw a tattoo with this standing bravely on his forearm.
“Life is short, and art is long”.
It was one of those rare measurable moments that I can reflect on without fail, and building for years on top of that abstract belief, I came to stumble upon the precursor to what today is known as Portion when I was corresponding with their CEO Jason Rosenstein through the crypto community, back when he was taking graduate level classes in cryptography in 2014.
Having raised funding to launch back in early 2018, the ecosystem was rife with bullish determination to “tokenize everything”. Soon, the meteoric rise, and fall of many ICO’s during this time period gave credence to the fact that most things did in fact, not need to be tokenized. Yet something remained true, there were myriad legitimate use cases for Blockchain.
While many companies gave up, Portion trudged onwards; a robust platform built on top of IPFS and Ethereum was developed for years, with the ultimate intent of immortalizing, tracking, verifying and reflecting ownership for the rare arts and collectibles market around the globe.
Portion is a peer-to-peer platform for artists and creators to generate and market their work without the need for an auction house or broker. It allows anyone regardless of their means or connections to invest in something they see beauty in. And above all else, it introduces a new concept into the art market — a sophisticated and decentralized marketplace for artwork. Some companies might allow you to buy a token that symbolizes fractional ownership of a Picasso, but Portion will allow the world to recognize and invest in the next Picasso, and to do so in a novel way through a sophisticated blockchain-based mercantile exchange, the likes of which exists nowhere else.
Portion focuses on tracking the provenance of art, which is actually the most common way art fraud is prevented. Essentially “How did this work come to be in the ownership of this person, from Artist to patron”. This is where a blockchain truly shines, and the nature of the blockchain is the perfect use case when used in conjunction with Portion’s world class team of experts and authenticators for the secondary market.
With the proliferation of internet connectivity and globalization, the ability for creatives to inspire and trade digital art that they’ve created has never been more rampant.
Something different
Removing the middle-man from the art market will increase efficiency by removing the bureaucratic shackles and value drains that often occur during secondary sales. Portion has a proprietary technology that embeds COA’s (Certificate of authenticity) within all physical and digital Art & Collectibles housed on the platform.
For the physical art, this is a smart-tag attached on part of the back of the piece that corresponds with a unique non-fungible token on the blockchain. For digital art, it’s a unique non-fungible token on the blockchain with an embedded image hash on IPFS. An innate decentralized escrow service is built in as a further redundancy for preventing fraud.
Ownership can no longer be disputed, and is transferred pseudo-anonymously on a public blockchain. This means that you have the tools to verify ownership without necessarily needing to link your identity to the art, yet still capable of doing that when you need to. The benefits of this are limitless, the ability to get scammed is inherently reduced, and friction leaves the market.
The fact that the original artist gets a percentage of the sale as royalties on subsequent sales should be enough to inspire a generation to pursue the globalized art market by reducing barriers to entry, and giving a platform that can inspire trust, spread creativity, authenticate originality, and ultimately increase value for new artists and patrons.
They say that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. Portion.io is the solution to revolutionizing the art market, and connecting a divided world through the sublimity of human creativity.
In time, the ability to seed imagination infused with trust through the blockchain will come to reflect one of the most bonafide breakthroughs in the established world of Arts and Collectibles, and the blooming ecosystem of digital works.
