A 256 year old institution is about to go 'full NFT'.
There aren’t too many companies that were founded back in the 1700's, that are still in existence today.
But of the few that remain, Christie's Auction House is one of them.
(They're the folks that sold Beeple’s ‘Everydays’ artwork for $69.3M)
...and now they’re taking things to the next level.
Christie’s has teamed up with a couple of big players in the Web3 space - Manifold, Chainalysis, and Spatial - to launch their own NFT platform called Christie’s 3.0.
They’re launching with just one project: 9 NFTs by Diana Sinclair.
What’s the difference between selling Beeple’s ‘Everydays’ through their auction house and selling Sinclair’s NFTs through their own NFT platform?
By having their own NFT platform, all transactions are made on-chain.
Which means no more taking payments in cash, then getting the buyers wallet address, and organizing a manual transfer of the NFT...
All payments, NFT transfers and authentication will be fully automated.
(And the faster/easier a system is to use, the quicker it can grow.)
Here are some reasons we think this is neat:
This is another example of an 'old dog' of a company, learning new tricks.
In order to exist for 256 years, you have to evolve with the times. It seems Christie’s are doing that brilliantly.
Christie’s isn’t just opening this up to any old NFT artist; they’ve said this will be a highly curated marketplace (similar to their auction house).
This is an interesting take on NFT marketplaces. Companies like OpenSea and Rarible do whatever they can to have as many projects on their platforms as possible; but are quite bloated as a result. It will be interesting to see how the exclusive path pans out.
Christies has a huge audience (and a lot of wealthy past clients!).
Christie’s 3.0 has the potential to bring a historically reluctant group of the population (wealthy, traditional art dealers) into Web3.
Let's see if this gets them another 256 years of business.
