The blockchain-based art registry startup Artory has acquired auction house database Auction Club, according to a tweet from Artory on March 21.
Auction Club is a subscription-only database containing sales information from more than 4,000 international auction houses.
According to industry media outlet The Art Newspaper, the move is set to make Auction Club’s sales data — reportedly gathered from around 250 businesses in 40 countries — public for the first time. The data will be available in Artory’s registry beginning in May, the report states.
Artory’s CEO, Nanne Dekking — formerly the vice chairman of Sotheby’s New York — was quoted in the publication as saying: “We couldn’t pass up this opportunity to acquire millions of data quickly that we can leverage to improve our products.”
Replying to concerns voiced by the publication that the aggregation of a huge amount of data under one company could contradict the idea of the distributed nature of blockchain technology, Paul Stabe, Artory’s chief product officer, underlined:
“The decentralisation of blockchain is a security benefit, not a solution. And for the art world, being able to leverage blockchain to provide access to credible data that are free is a huge benefit.”
In October 2018, Christie’s — the auction house with a history going back over 250 years — announced a pilot scheme with Artory to use blockchain for auction data. The partnership proposed using the technology to provide details and certificates of purchases to buyers.
Last fall, one of the world’s most famous art galleries, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia, launched the blockchain-based project “My Tretyakov. ” The project allows individuals as well as enterprises to make a private donations, as Cointelegraph reported.