Christie’s, the 256-year-old fine art auction house, is debuting Christie’s 3.0, an Ethereum-based NFT marketplace, with the launch of an exclusive collection from leading Web 3.0 visual artist Diana Sinclair.
On Tuesday, September 27, Christie’s announced Christie’s 3.0, a newly developed Ethereum-based NFT marketplace, which will allow for fully on-chain NFT sales, demonstrating the auction house’s commitment to artists and collectors in the Web3 space.
Christie’s 3.0 allows to carry out auctions on the Ethereum blockchain network from start to finish. All transactions, including post-sale, will be automatically recorded on the blockchain. The auction house says it will also provide first-of-its-kind anti-money laundering, compliance and taxation tools built into the platform.
The New York-based auction house made big waves in the market by auctioning Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” artwork for US$69.3 million in March 2021. However, the auction house did not conduct previous NFT sales on-chain.
Nicole Sales Giles, director of digital art sales at Christie’s, commented in a news release that the new marketplace would “offer the public the opportunity to collect exceptional NFTs in the way they are meant to be transacted, on-chain.”
The company developed Christie’s on-chain platform in partnership with Manifold – a startup focusing on the smart contract technology behind NFTs. Other partners include blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis and metaverse platform Spatial to help expand the marketplace’s capabilities.
“Manifold is honoured to partner with Christie’s to launch a fully on-chain art marketplace,” says Eric Diep, founder and CEO of Manifold. “The launch of Christie’s 3.0 signifies an institutional expansion of the regulated market for digital assets, which both validates NFTs as an art form and provides incredible benefits for digital artists.”
Similar to Christie’s physical fine art sales, NFTs offered on Christie’s 3.0 will only display highly curated artworks from known artists. As of today, the market’s inaugural sale begins, which offers a collection of nine NFTs from Diana Sinclair, an 18-year-old internationally-awarded artist.
