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FRESCO Announces the Airdrop of 500 FRESCO Tokens (FRES) to the First 10,000 Participants





Through blockchain technology, FRESCO enables artists, investors, dealers, galleries, and administrators around the world to demonstrate their artworks and evaluate collection strength, eventually creating an efficient and intuitive art value measurement system. FRESCO tokens (FRES) represent the level of trust distributed to each artwork.

To establish a quantifiable ecosystem for the evaluation and sharing of artworks, FRESCO pioneered in introducing the trust token distribution mechanism, FRESCO Protocol. FRESCO Protocol will create an efficient contractual mechanism between users and their artworks.

Once the FRESCO platform is live, FRESCO Token holders will have the priority to allocate their FRES tokens to their artworks. Each user’s spendable FRESCO tokens is FRES Cash, and the amount of FRES Cash one possesses represents their art trust distribution limit. The number of FRESCO tokens allocated to artwork will be the FRES Trust. In the future, it will be the only decentralized and reliable indicator of an artwork’s potential value.

The FRES Trust reflects the total value of trust given to artwork by its current and previous owners. The FRES Trust distributed to each artwork is publicly visible and anonymous in identity. The distribution of the FRES Trust is irrevocable and adds a unique index of trust value to the artwork. The FRES Trust reflects the comprehensive academic and market value of that artwork in the intricate art environment. There are two types of transaction records between users generated on the FRESCO platform:

● FRES Cash Transaction: Transaction history of FRES Cash.
● FRES Art Transaction: Transaction history of artworks and attached FRES Trust.

The trust value of the artworks in the FRESCO network will accumulate after multiple transactions, resulting in the appreciation of its market value. In the FRESCO network, users can distribute a certain amount of FRES Cash to the artworks they own. FRESCO Protocol generates the digital provenance of the artworks on the blockchain.

Transactions and circulation of art have been under myriad regulation for more than five centuries. On the operational level, however, the opaqueness of the transaction, the ambiguity of authenticity, the highly concentrated power of pricing and the exclusive collector’s circle along with a lack of access to prestigious artwork have together formed a formidable barrier that kept most art investors from the market. FRESCO, a revolutionary art trust evaluation and information sharing network, creates a decentralized art ecosystem. Unlike the traditional primary and secondary art market, all artworks in the FRESCO network are systematically archived on the blockchain. This offers an assurance of anonymity, transparency, and liquidity, while potentially solving issues such as appraisal, authentication, and information asymmetry.

The rapid development of blockchain technology has created an unprecedented opportunity for the art industry. FRESCO's blockchain-based trust token mechanism and decentralized database network will attract more potential investors to today’s art market. Furthermore, this decentralized and self-learning artificialy intelligent database combining with FRESCO’s world-class algorism will be able to further predict user’s future artwork inclination.

FRESCO, the world's first blockchain-based ecosystem serving art collectors, practitioners, and related organizations, connects the realms of technology, finance, and art market and create a decentralized platform for the trade, investment, research, archival, and management of artworks.

The FRESCO Operations and Advisory Teams include leading figures in the global art scene, the blockchain industry, and financial realm. Our engineering team has extensive experience in developing blockchain projects. The FRESCO team will release our testing network, FRESCO Alpha Net Version One (FANVO), among the world’s mega-galleries, museums, and private collectors within nine months. Collaborations at this scope will enrich the FRESCO database and facilitate the art trust tokenization.

FRESCO has structured the FRESCO (FRES) token sale to comply with applicable regulatory requirements. The token sale will be structured as a reward based crowdfunding campaign, where contributors in return for their
donations will receive FRESCO tokens (FRES).

FRES total token supply will be 500,000,000, and for this supply:

60% will be distributed during token Pre-Sale & Main-Sale,
20% will be reserved for FRESCO foundation,
20% will be reserved for FRESCO team.

Pre-Sale time will be:

02/15/2018 9AM UTC – 02/20/2018 9PM UTC

Main-Sale time will be:

02/21/2018 9AM UTC – 03/15/2018 9PM UTC

FRES’s pricing will be:

1 ETH = 6500 FRES during Pre-Sale (30% discount),
1 ETH = 5000 FRES during Main-Sale.

The cap will be reached once the distributed FRES token gets sold out.



Art investment has ranked the third in all kinds of financial investment, after real estate and stocks. Art is a stable savings wealth and unique tangible asset, which has low relevance to traditional markets, such as the stock market. Art also has the aesthetic appreciation and social value, influencing on the personal image, history of the family, enterprise culture, and a nation’s cultural profile. On November 15, 2017 Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” sold for $450.3 million by Christie’s in New York, after the former most expensive painting in auction, Paul Gauguin’s “When will you marry?”, which sold for $300 million in 2015.[1] Even before the auction started, the public already know that the da Vinci’s piece would bid the new high record. More than 27,000 people had lined up at preview of this painting in Hong Kong, London, San Francisco and New York to take a glimpse of the savior under dim light in distance from the several barrier doors.[2] The astonishing and alluring prices of fine art at auction give the public an illusional impression about the art market on the profitability of art investment.

However, looking at the international and entire art market today, we are probably at a low point in the down cycle of art investment. Since 2003, the average growth of the art market was 28 percent annually until 2007, and it reached the peak in 2007 at $ 65 billion. Mainly due to the global financial crisis, the art market shrunk to $ 60 billion in 2008 and after.[3] It still has not recovered from the massive losses and the estimated market size in 2016 is around $56.6 billion, no matter how actively the auction houses and galleries tried to change and revitalize art market.

Although the current art market looks like it is in a passive stage, the potential size of the art market is huge due to the booming new art markets in non-traditional art market in the world and chances for newcomers to join in through social media. The increases in number of Asian buyers and demands in Asian art fueled the growth of international art market and will continue to stimulate it as well. Moreover, social media changed the traditional buyers approach to find artworks. According to Forbes, “social media has become the primary way consumers discover art that nearly a quarter (22.7%) of art buyers find new works of art via social media, which edged out museums (20%) and galleries (15.9%) as buyers’ primary source of discovery”. [4]

Despite potential expanding size of art market, it still is relatively complex to buy, sell and evaluate artworks. Entering the art world requires knowledge of artworks, aesthetic appreciation, ability to store and maintain artworks in long terms, and reputation in art collecting, and, in the meantime, there is no guarantees of profitability. When you walked in a gallery and see a $10,000 painting, you cannot justify the price tag from another $100 artwork. IN addition to the evaluation, Collectors have a hard time proving to the galleries that they do have the purchasing power, as well as proving to each other that they are serious collectors. From the gallery side, gallery specialists have a hard time telling clients which artwork is truly worth the value, and they also face redundant and arduous process of trying to verify whether this new potential collector is truly well-financed enough to take home a piece such as a Warhol or Pollock. Museum also lack a universal way of comparison to show the world that their collection is the most valuable and of greatest importance in the art world. Finally, as the most important part of art industry, artists are restricted by the standard way of binding gallery together to exhibit and sell their works. Other freelanced artists may establish their studios under non-profits’ sponsorship or when they can finance themselves.
 
Above all, gatekeepers are still prevalent in art industry today, where technology have crushed the barriers of entry in various industries. A solution is needed, a decentralized way is needed for art participants to evaluate each other’s art collection strength.
 
Fresco addresses these problems by providing beginner and advanced artists, investors, galleries, and institutions to see and add their believed value on artworks they owned on the platforms, giving the sense of potential monetary value of these artworks to the public.

Our intuitive platform reduces financial verification process on both selling and buying sides, education on art provenance, and display of artworks by complicated information. We aim to provide anonymousness, security, and transparency for any user.

Fresco is not just another art connoisseurship or evaluation platform. In fact, Fresco aims to accomplish something far more interesting by tackling the key pain points of distribution of trust: establishing a quantifiable ecosystem for the evaluation and sharing of artworks.

The company’s legal entities and the core team of Fresco are based in Switzerland. Fresco’s team consists of ten core team members and advisors. The team is diverse in nature and nurture. All have proven experience in the field of so ware art, financial technology and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. Additionally, the team will be supported by experienced advisors in the fields of art market, finance, and blockchain.

In the next chapter, we will describe a current art industry structure that build the whole art market and how they influence each other. A projection on how Fresco aims to break the boundary in the current art market.


1. Current Art Industry Structure
 
What are the channels of art transactions?
 
The channels of art transactions consist auction house, gallery, art fair, and online sale. According to UBS’s annual global art market analysis in 2017, the global art market achieved total sales of $56.6 billion in 2016, which sales at public auction of fine and decorative art and antiques accounted for 39% of the whole market (estimated to $22.1 billion), gallery accounted for 29% of sales (estimated to $16.5 billion), art fairs accounted for 23.5% (estimated to $13.3 billion), and online sales were of the 4.6% total (estimated to $2.6 billion).  The highly fragmented international art market included an estimated 296,315 businesses in 2016, from a total of 310,450 businesses involved directly in buying and selling art worldwide.
 
What are the different groups and segmentations of art industry?
 
Art industry can be divided by the purposes of groups into the commercial and academic sides. The groups from the commercial sides include gallery specialists, auctioneers, dealers, collectors, and investors, etc. The academic groups contain researchers, professors, and museum curators, etc.
Categorized by segmentation of the market, art market can be separated by primary and secondary market. The primary market refers to when an artwork involves the market for the first time, usually transactions sold at a gallery, or direct from an artist's studio. The secondary market refers to re-selling artwork, usually through an art dealer or at an auction.
 
How to define the value of art?
 
The value of art contains the monetary value and artistic value. The artistic value refers to the significance of the work in that time period and in the development of art, and aesthetic appeals to the viewers. personal value to the buyer. The monetary value of art may reflect the artistic value or may not. It is difficult to determine the price of an art, because the judgment of an art’s monetary includes various factors, like the provenance, condition, the market trend caused by a certain event, the timing to sell the art, and the economic environment.
 
For a long time, the evaluation of art state varies in diversified factors, such as exhibition, awards and public collection record, publication and media coverage by the public collections, private transaction and public auction record, status reports, etc.; the size, median, production time, theme, style and genre of the work, and the degree of scarcity; economy, market demand for similar works and their substitutes, etc.
 
2.1 FRESCO and the Art Market

2.1.1 Artists
Promote works through FRES trust
It is not rare to hear about how a gallerist, a dealer, or a critic discovered a master from their dim basement studios. Local galleries have a limited clientele while mega galleries mostly focus on established and mid-career artists. Artists are usually stuck at a passive position on the market, allowed few platforms to promote themselves except for waiting to be spotted. FRESCO makes possible a self-initiated promoting campaign by artists.

Simply get FRES cash, distribute an amount to a work, and its value is marked as FRES trust. With a click of FRES cash distribution, artists decide which works to be featured in the FRESCO headline and collectors’ search.

Importantly, FRES trust is not about an artist’s grading of the artwork, but their trust on its prospect. FRESCO understands how upsetting it can be to put artists and their works in some competition or ranking. With FRES trust, artists enjoy complete freedom in promoting their works without having to equal the trust value with a bold price tag.

Example 1:
Martin is an Austrian painter in his early thirties. He finds it hard to pay for the studio and living expenses, as he has sold few works since graduating from art school due to a lack of access to the market.

With FRESCO, Martin is embracing a new career. He bought 5,000 tokens (FRES Cash), spent 1,000 on one of his favorite paintings and split the rest among other of his available works. All the works Martin presented are marked with a clear trust value allocated by himself. Martin no longer needs intermediaries to retell and rearrange his story. He can finally address his ideas to an ever-larger audience among the general public.

Exhibit works digitally
FRESCO indulges your wildest dreams in the art world. Users can click on an image, grasp all its history, talk to the artist, make a purchase all at once, and finally have that work listed on their own page.

Artists can upload any of their works onto the homepage, providing all the detailed information and images, and forming an immersive solo show experience, instead of fighting for attention and an exhibition schedule at a gallery space.

Example 2:
Martin has been seeking public exposure from all sorts of social media, only to be frustrated with all the overwhelming information without a clear reference to tell the good from those of mediocre quality.

On Martin’s homepage on FRESCO, all the works are catalogued clearly. Compared to traditional exhibition spaces, being exhibited on FRESCO means a place in the massive narrative of global art history.

Facilitate search and transaction
In the traditional art market, only a relatively small part of the total amount a buyer paid goes to the artist. Gallery shares, taxes, and commissions for consultants sometimes add up to a striking number. FRESCO largely reduces the unnecessary cost and welcomes more art lovers to enter the market.

Anyone, from anywhere at any time, can access the uploaded artworks. Art is easy to search and to acquire through FRESCO, as long as an artist is in the network.

Example 3:
After Martin uploads his available works and distributes his FRES cash onto them, all the users on FRESCO get to see the featured artworks and, if desired, browse through all his works.

Camila, a Spanish collector, contacted Martin five hours later to inquire about the price and his oeuvre. Camila explained that she found this fresh and intricate work by Martin when browsing through the top valued works on FRESCO.

2.1.2 Investors
Obtain digital provenance
Provenance, in the realm of art, refers to the chronology documenting the ownership of an artwork. Though an essential issue for art transactions, appraisal, and art banking, it is usually incomplete and inaccurate.

With FRESCO, contemporary art can be easily traced back to the artist who produced it. For artworks with a longer history, the indisputable chain of records also allows no frauds in the documentation of ownership.

Along with the process when users distribute FRES Cash to the artworks they own and transfer FRES Trust accompanying each art transaction, FRESCO Protocol generates the digital provenance of all the artworks on the blockchain. The record is kept safe, anonymous, and flawless.

Example 4:
Eleanor has been devotedly collecting modern and contemporary art for decades. Her major suppliers are dealers and galleries from the secondary market. One of her acquisitions became a huge trouble. Though the gallery insists on the work’s authenticity, the artist denied it. Another work from her collection reached her with a poor condition, as the previous owner stored it in his mansion close to a tropical forest, exposing the work to excessive humidity and temperature.

The concerns Eleanor used to have—to whom the work belonged, where it was stored, how its condition is like—cease to be a problem. An effortless search can bring all the wanted information ready at hand.

Quantify the value of art
The value of art is essentially undeterminable. It is affected by numerous factors, such as the exhibitions, publications, and awards related to the artist, price records from the primary market and auction houses, and the condition, dimensions, mediums, year, subject, style and rarity of the artwork. Beside these generic or traceable qualities of the artwork, the general situation of the economy and the taste of its contemporary society simultaneously add to the possible fluctuation of the value.

Attempts to generate an index for a quantified value of art are many. Most of the models, however, are opaque, arbitrary, and thus subject to manipulation. FRESCO’s democratized and transparent mechanism eliminates your doubts.

Any current outsider, without much knowledge of art history or the market, can refer to the FRES trust of an artwork and have access to all its records online. Whether used for investing or simply information gathering, FRESCO is your reliable reference.

Example 5:
Amy, an engineer from Australia, is enthusiastic about contemporary photography but always hesitant about whether they are worth the money. From now on, she can have great confidence in discerning an artwork with the help of FRES trust and artists’ talks related to the artwork.

At the same time, FRESCO relieves all her strain of anxiety from inquiring about the proper price range of the work she likes and gathering previous trust records as a reference for its market potential.  

Establish personal image and collection strength
Generous patrons, visioned entrepreneurs, and anyone striving to build up your image in the exclusive art world, now with the help of FRESCO, have a unique channel to demonstrate your taste and power. While avoiding exposing the monetary value of a collection, which is usually undesirable, collectors are able to publicly exhibit the artworks they have and make a statement through the distribution of FRES cash. Transactions of artworks and their attached trust value further bring forward a social network based on art.

Millennial collectors can finally gain a say in the art scene with the least effort possible. FRESCO saves your trouble of broadcasting the message through traditional art media or social events, delivering your profile to a larger audience in a more efficient way.

Example 6:
Thomas, founder and director of a biotech company, is a young collector with not much experience in the art world. He attends gallery and museum openings, events at collector’s clubs, and public talks with major media, but still feels a need for more exposure. A good reputation in the art world—an image of generosity and connoisseurship—should earn him an access to the most sought-after artworks and help boost the share of his company.  

By uploading his collection to FRESCO and building up an impressive profile, Thomas only needs to supply a wallet address when purchasing high-end art from galleries, his credibility immediately verified. He is no longer frustrated by the harrowing process of building up trust with a dealer or a gallery. At another private dinner, Thomas is surprised to hear a respectable critic talking about the collection he has and easily befriends with a close circle of the critic.

Promote a particular collection
FRESCO infuses higher liquidity to the current art market. A collector seeking buyers for a particular piece from their collection is now able to promote the work by adding tangible weight to its value. The current holder needs not bother to dig out any favorable historical traces of an artwork. Instead, mounting its FRES trust will do all the talk.

As the transfer from FRES cash to FRES trust is irreversible, potential buyers are promised with a higher future value of the artwork and substantially more tokens into their account.

Example 7:
Gretchen has a large collection and at the moment urgently needs to liquidity some of her assets. Reselling an artwork was not easy for Gretchen, despite how rare and valuable her collection is. Dealers and galleries she works with are usually helpful, yet still, the negotiations back and forth can hugely stretch the process. For a devoted collector like Gretchen, to cut the prices of a cherished work is especially heartrending.

To put an artwork in the market and convince would-be buyers of its value, however, is amazingly simple. Gretchen bought some FRES tokens and added them to the work she’d like to sell. The work gets broadcasted to a small circle of collectors who share similar interests with Gretchen. A higher trust value means a sincere seller, a greater market potential for the work, and thus easily attracts potential buyers.

Simplify transactions
FRESCO creates a vigorous network for rising power in the artwork. Spotting the talented is never easier when multiple roles are motivated to speak on a same all-inclusive platform.

Any available artwork can be uploaded to the pool on FRESCO. Once the wallet address behind is linked to the owner’s contact information, FRESCO functions as a large-scale decentralized network for immediate trades. Fees traditionally paid to any unnecessary intermediary—largely composed of the commissions paid for searching, evaluating, and acquiring an artwork—are deducted from an investor’s cost.

No additional role is needed to facilitate and supervise a transaction. All that matters is the decentralized, open, and efficient ecosystem.  

Example 8:
Joel mostly buys blue-chip art from galleries. He hopes to support more emerging artists but has no time to pay studio visits or to wander around group shows at art schools. On FRESCO, Joel has found a number of talented young artists and can buy works directly from them. Anytime some sought-after artworks by renowned artists show up on FRESCO, Joel also finds it quite convenient to contact the seller through the network. Such private deals save a large amount of extra cost and troubles of going through a centralized intermediary network.

Get personalized feeds, digest, and notifications
The massive artworks and their information on FRESCO will lead to a huge database with an unprecedented scale. Users can personalize their interests and enjoy a tailored regular digest based on advanced algorithms. With a comprehensive analysis of user’s habits, recommendations for artists and artworks will be of least irrelevance or redundancy.

First-hand industry insights will also be easily accessible, despite whatever role you have in the art scene. Forget about the lengthy reports and annoying push messages. All you actually need is compressed into one page.

Example 9:
Lily is a millennial collector. She has subscribed most of the major art media to catch up with all the latest happenings in the art world—newly awarded art prizes, scheduled art biennials, or striking auction records—but found it hard to grasp the information she exactly needs out of the ocean of reports and headlines.

Based on Lily’s browsing history and transaction records, plus her selected fields of interest, FRESCO offers a made-to-measure weekly digest to Lily, as well as an AI-generated recommendation of artworks and notifications on the important updates she might be interested.

2.1.3 Researchers and critics
Refer to trust value
Unlike the current practice of researching an artwork—piling up facts of exhibition records, critical acclaims, auction records, notable provenance, and extracting any other clues from the vast history—an evaluation based on FRES trust cannot be simpler.

Researchers and critics are still encouraged to share their thoughts on the justifiability of a particular trust value, but FRES trust does speak for an approximate fair market value.

Explore possibilities for financial products
FRESCO is not only for those with a passion for art, but also for an unrestrained imagination of financial products. Existing or piloted options, such as art as collateral, fractionated ownership, or art funds, will also be available on FRESCO in a gradual process.

FRESCO ecology will be rendered an essential indicator of the general market in fine art and high finance.

Example 10:
Fred has extensive experience and resources in finance and has been thinking about building an art fund. FRES trust, as a tangible value of art that allows flexible operations, becomes amazingly helpful for him to select artworks and fully realize their market potential.

As Fred accumulates his reputation in the FRESCO network, more users are impressed by his judiciousness and get into contact with him to speak about investment.  

Make valuable voices heard
With the development of FRESCO protocol, renowned art critics and scholars will get free tokens to add on to the valued works, serving to balance against possible market speculations.

Individual users will be able to follow the FRES accounts that they believe have an eye for the true gems, which might be allocated with a relatively low trust value at a particular stage, and make investments with the help of professional knowledge and connoisseurship.

Every token added to the artwork is marked with its origin, rendering the mechanism more resistant to malicious manipulation of trust value.

Example 11:
Nathalie is an art critic, curator, and columnist for an art newspaper. She also writes frequently on social media accounts. Despite the high quality of the content, she only has a limited audience, those from art history backgrounds or a few other related industries.

FRESCO invited Natalie to join, write her opinions, and importantly, adds FRES trust to artworks she thinks worth more attention. To encourage voices from learned critics like Nathalie, FRESCO supplies them with regular tokens at no cost. Nathalie distributes her quota this month entirely to an emerging artist from an underrepresented region, to call for attention to the artist’s fresh and skillful paintings.