Provenance for physical art, free for the collector, built in four months.
Stealth mode · United Kingdom
- $0 for a collector to register, verify or trace an artwork; the platform pays the gas
- 4 months from chain research to a finished gallery, storefront and back office
What did Bushido build for this Web3 art gallery?
A gallery that links physical artworks to on-chain provenance, so collectors can verify and trade real-world art backed by NFTs. Registering, verifying and tracing an artwork costs the collector nothing; the platform pays the gas. Bushido designed and built it in four months, with two and a half developers and a delivery manager.
The problem
Our partner wanted galleries and artists to record an artwork’s life as signed Events, with records correctable without losing what came before. He had a brief, a finished design and little time.
The solution
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Chose the chain before writing a contract.
Immutable X could not be customised enough, so we agreed on Polygon.
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Made provenance signable.
Parties sign each Event (created, sold, gifted, auctioned, framed), and only verified signatures show, so the history is a certificate of authenticity.
The result
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Chain | Immutable X: data off-chain, gas to move it | Polygon, with Ethereum’s security and low fees |
| Cost to the collector | Gas whenever data moves on-chain | $0: gasless meta-transactions |
| Correcting a record | Editable data or an immutable record, not both | Amendments on top of a history that is never erased |
The back office runs on Retool, so our partner could run it himself.
Stack, team and facts
Digital companion token.
Web3, Art & Culture
4 months, 2022
2.5 developers, 1 delivery manager
Smart Contracts with backend system and Web3 gallery storefront. Admin dashboard
Next.js, Tailwind, Polygon, Solidity, Hardhat, OpenZeppelin, Moralis, Infura, MongoDB, Retool, SST, AWS (Lambda@Edge, S3, Cloudfront)
Next
- Earlier work, 2021 to 2023Smart-contract products, kept on the record. Not a service line.
- Catblox: ERC-20 utility token and marketplaceThe next case study.
Questions
Questions people ask about this gallery.
How can artwork metadata be corrected without breaking provenance?
Through amendments: metadata can be updated, but the original record is never removed.
Who pays the gas fees?
The platform, through gasless meta-transactions, so the collector pays nothing.
Yours is next.
Same team, sharper tools. Tell us where you are and we will tell you what it takes (scope, shape and a timeline we would actually hold ourselves to) on a 30-minute call with a builder.