The art market operates thanks to several categories of central intermediaries
:
- market intermediaries to bring supply and demand into contact.
- financial intermediaries who produce the works or finance them.
- intermediaries who specify the quality of the work.
Decentralized finance, commonly known as DeFi, is a form of finance that does not rely on intermediaries
.
DeFi uses smart contracts based on a blockchain, it is actually a set of computer codes, defining the rules of a financial tool and executed on the nodes of the blockchain. Only blockchains supporting smart contracts allow executing these codes, such as Ethereum, Solana, Flow, BinanceSmartChain etc.
- Initially, DeFi made it possible to do without traditional financial instruments managed by central financiers such as brokerage houses, stock exchanges or banks.
- Now with the emergence of the NFT market, it is no longer just cryptocurrencies that are traded through smart contracts but also Art.
Rarible (on Ethereum) and TheMasterPiece (on Flow) projects are two examples of different applications, based on smart contracts to exchange NFTs.
- Rarible (https://rarible.com/): Smart contracts written with the Solidity language make it possible to organize the exchange of NFTs and the distribution of royalties
- TheMasterPiece (http://themasterpiece.art/): On-Chain NFTs are pixels in TheMasterPiece, defined by position and color. Smart contracts, written in the Cadence language, allow to purchase, to design, and to resale pixels that make up a community work of art. There is no notion of royalties when reselling pixels, each new owner can express their art freely on their pixels.
Be careful, projects abound today and being able to determine the quality of NFTs on the market is more or less easy to discover. NFTs projects are very heterogeneous, and as in the art world, the quality conventions associated with them. It is not easy to navigate
