Art Sale Of 318 Million USD Conducted By Auction House Through Blockchain

By Rishma Banerjee

The blockchain market has been growing in popularity every day, and introducing this technology into daily activities, has been the most important aim of the industry. As BTC Wires had earlier reported, Christie’s, an art based auction house was all set to make sales through blockchain technology. A report recently made it public that this art sale has been finalized on a blockchain network and was a record-breaking incident as almost 318 million dollars had changed hands making it the most valuable art auction to have been ever recorded on a blockchain. Christie’s, a 252-year-old New York-based auction house hosted participants from 23 countries who were successful in breaking quite a few sales records for American Art.

The collection in question was a set of exquisite artworks from the Barney A. Ebsworth Collections, which according to art experts was one of the most important privately held collections of 20th century America. The report said that the collection had been sold for a remarkable sum of $317,801,250.

The auction was conducted in collaboration with Artory, an art based digital registry which uses blockchain technology and coding to record and register artwork and collectibles. Artory, who’s one of the main goals is to promote transparency, and digital security uses permissioned blockchain to host the said auction. It used the Ethereum blockchain, in order to keep track of all the records of the artworks. This includes information such as sales, final prices, auction dates, item titles, restorations, and theft. There were  42 pieces, put up for auction including the works of famous artists like William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Demuth amongst which, Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey, was the most expensive artwork that was sold, fetched a whopping sum of 91,875,000 USD.