First Digital Art Marketplace on Blockchain to Launch on Halloween
DADA, the first commercialized Ethereum blockchain-based digital art marketplace for artists and content creators, will launch on the day of Halloween to celebrate the holiday with a digital art collection called “Creeps & Weirdos.”, which will feature 100 Halloween-themed limited edition artworks.
Public blockchain networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum utilize cryptographic keys and signatures to approve transactions and sign unique data. Because Ethereum is a decentralized and immutable blockchain network, transactions or smart contracts processed by the Ethereum protocol and its miners cannot be altered without breaching into the entire network.
As the network operates with a significant amount of computing power which a centralized entity cannot possibly generate, Ethereum transactions and smart contracts are unalterable by nature.
Essentially, the DADA digital art marketplace is assigning a unique private key or signature to a single artwork to ensure that digital content creators can sell original pieces of digital artwork to buyers within a peer-to-peer protocol.
In the traditional art industry, it is possible to purchase fake or counterfeit versions of widely recognized paintings like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The original Mona Lisa painting, which was acquired in 1960s at $100 million, is currently worth more than $790 million, given the inflation rate of the US dollar over the past few decades. But, fake versions of the original Mona Lisa paintings can be acquired at much lower costs.
The DADA Ethereum-based platform leverages the Ethereum network to ensure that buyers can only purchase original artworks directly from creators through the usage of blockchain. The ownership of an artwork on DADA can be proven by smart contracts which are broadcast to the main Ethereum network. Once broadcast, the ownership of artworks can also be verified through DADA and public blockchain explorers.
More to that, since the quantity of digital artworks can be set by the content creators, DADA offers five levels of scarcity that contribute to the real-world value of artworks.
Developers of DADA explained:
“DADA Is the only social network on Earth where people speak to each other through drawings. Thousands of artists create beautiful spontaneous visual conversations right in our platform. The DADA art collection becomes permanently embedded in the blockchain and can no longer be modified. This allows a user to verify that there are indeed only a certain number of limited edition DADA Artworks, that the artwork you buy belongs to you, and that it was created by a specific artist.”
The web-based platform of DADA itself is connected to the Ethereum blockchain network in real-time, as it fetches data including artworks, creators, ownership, and more. As shown in the screenshot below, the images and information of creators are taken from Ethereum and displayed on the DADA platform.
If a buyer decides to purchase one of the artworks, for instance one of the works of the Halloween-themed collection, the buyer needs to send an Ethereum transaction to DADA to acquire the digital artwork.
In June, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, the co-founders of Larva Labs, executed a similar idea in which 10,000 artworks were distributed using the Ethereum blockchain to create a decentralized art marketplace.
“The whole thing is pretty weird, and that’s kind of why we did this. There’s like a weird intersection here between these virtual, digital things and an artificial rarity, but a rarity that is real and valuable in some sense,” said Hall.
The developers of DADA aim to create a commercial platform wherein both digital content creators and buyers can benefit from the transparent and incentivized marketplace.
