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(Kitco News) - Art auction house Sotheby’s is wading deeper into the digital asset waters with the launch of its own secondary marketplace for fine art nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
According to a report from NFT Now, the famous auction house is looking to expand on its Sotheby’s Metaverse – originally launched in October 2021 – and establish itself as the go-to fine art platform for the secondary market as well.
“When Sotheby’s Metaverse first launched more than a year ago, our goal was to bring to market a first-of-its-kind platform that would be distinguished by the expertise and vision of our specialists to curate sales of NFTs,” Sebastian Fahey, Sotheby’s Executive Lead for Metaverse said. “Now, we are continuing to advance and evolve our platform to offer new and more seamless ways for the community to discover and collect new forms of digital collectibles, from limited edition NFTs to unique works by the artists redefining perceptions of digital art.”
The integrated sales system for the secondary marketplace will be fully on-chain via the Ethereum and Polygon networks, and users can pay using the native ETH or MATIC token.
Work from artists selected by Sotheby’s digital art specialists will be featured on a rotating basis on the new marketplace. The first batch of 13 artists included in the platform’s launch are Tyler Hobbs, Claire Silver, XCOPY, Diana Sinclair, IX Shells, Sarah Zucker, Refik Anadol, Sofia Crespo, Sam Spratt, Pindar van Arman, Osinachi, Hackatao, and Sebastião Salgado.
Sotheby’s said it intends to utilize smart contracts in order to pay out artist royalties and will do so in accordance with each artist’s stated on-chain royalty rate.
Royalty payments have been a point of contention on other NFT platforms – including OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace by volume – with many platforms lowering the royalty amount they pay out to artists in an effort to attract more users and increase their market share.
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Royalties have been key to attracting artists to the Web3 space and building out the NFT ecosystem, and Sotheby’s wants to make sure that it can attract the top talent moving forward while harnessing its brand name to attract high-value bidders.
“Sotheby’s commitment to honoring artist royalties comes amidst a larger debate about royalties within the NFT community and signals Sotheby’s artist-first ethos as one of the only major NFT marketplaces committed to artist resale royalties,” the press release said of its policy.
The company is also planning to launch a new digital art gallery through the Web3 art gallery platform Oncyber in June that will feature select works from the secondary market. Sotheby’s is partnering with the well-known pseudonymous digital art collector Cozomo de’ Medici to curate one of the gallery’s rooms.
The launch of the new offering from Sotheby’s comes at an interesting time, as the floor prices for even the most popular projects have fallen sharply while volumes in the NFT market are at 20-month lows.
