

Blockchain based digital art gallery for traditional arts, that allows galleries and artists to add events and sign them to prove provenance and provide traceability as pieces change hands, powered by NFTs.
‘NFT’ is the term for the underlying technology used, this token is not considered to be a piece of digital art (which has become synonymous with NFTs).
It is a companion token that adds utility to a piece of physical art, designed to be completely valueless on its own and is completely free for the user.
It lets you display physical artwork proudly alongside your virtual art collection, whilst also offering a space to verify ownership, prove and trace provenance and providing a rich history of an artwork.
It is a gallery, proof-of-ownership, visual history and COA (certificate of authenticity) all in one.
To allow edit but to keep the immutable record of these art pieces, it is possible to add an amendment if there’s a mistake in the data, but not the remove the error.
Artists or collectors upload their artwork and add details of the provenance in the form of ‘Events’.
Each event can mention other parties such as the artist, restorer, gallery or any other entity involved in the work. These mentioned events can be signed by the relevant parties, for example an event might say: “Framed by Lord & Duplooy, London”, which Lord & Duplooy sign to verify that this is true. You verify that it is a legitimate piece and digitally sign the piece/token.
Our partner proposed to use Immutable-X. Layer-2 scaling solution that would lower the transaction costs and make the mint free.
After research was conducted we came to the conclusion that Immutable-X stores data off-chain and once user wants to move the data to blockchain, they would need to pay for the gas fee.
Besides that, Immutable-X does not provide customization required for this project. Thus, the mutual agreement was made to use Polygon instead to enjoy the benefits and security of Ethereum, without the infamous gas fees that hurts its users.
This allowed us to reduce gas fees and make platform completely free for the user. On top of that, we have implemented gasless meta-transactions, where the platform pays all the gas fees for the user.
The minted tokens follow ERC721 standard. All artwork metadata is stored on-chain, while images are stored on the IPFS including additional images that can be used to show the condition of the artwork.
Users can upload proof of ownership videos or images, which we store on a centralized file storage for convenience.
ERC721 only supports a single asset for the token, we enriched the NFTs with a custom method that returns all of the additional assets – being on IPFS/centralized.
Each token has metadata such as title, description, author name, edition, condition etc. All of these metadata can be updated, but there exists a mechanism that allows to trace who made an update, what changed as well as accept/decline the metadata change.
New metadata attributes can be added since all smart contracts are upgradable.
Each artwork can have ‘Events’ associated with it.
Events such as who created the artwork, to whom it was sold, gifted, auctioned by or any or any custom event the current owner of digital artwork wants to add. Events can be signed by relevant sides (galleries, artists, collectors and are kept on-chain).
The digital gallery shows only relevant signatures from verified users by the platform. Technically anyone can sign and confirm the ‘Event’ but the platform will show only relevant signers.
The platform will automatically mint the uploaded artwork from verified users / addresses, for unverified users, a mint request appears in the back office that project owner can accept or decline. Besides mint requests, admin can add new artists, mark trending NFTs or artists, search for users, verify accounts etc.
Given the project brief and ready to go design, we have created a solution and developed the product with minimal interaction from our busy stakeholder that was running multiple businesses and only had the idea about the solution to the problem he was trying to solve.