New Tech Solves an Old Problem for Artists using Web3 — ATO Platform
A wealth manager, a technologist, an angel investor, and an art patron walk into a bar — what do you get? No, seriously, what do you get? To those who have been grappling with how to drag the $55B art market out of the dark ages and into modern asset management practice, it is no joke. In fact, it is as close to the Holy Grail as we have seen in the last 370 years.
What makes ATO Platform special is the same thing that turned the few successful 2016 financial tech companies into unicorns– the effort and attention needed to change the industry from within.
The six-year saga to launch ATO Platform — a souped-up, tech-abundant asset management solution — is a harrowing story that will make for a great novel. Spoiler alert: the final chapter shows the triumph of financial logic and price transparency over greed, pricing intrigues, and economic exclusion. The ATO Platform has been built to lead in the areas of art sales tracking, royalty collection, copyright protection, and authentication. The mission is to broadly apply technology and asset management practices to support artists, encourage fair dealing, and create a sustainable distribution of profits within the arts ecosystem.
To say there has been a demand for this type of solution is a gross understatement. It has taken so long for the same reason that 96% of the companies from the 2016 fintech bonanza failed. The Art Economy is not easy. Even the most silver-tongued, over-capitalized technologists won’t succeed by just “showing up and teaching the art industry how to use technology”. A frontal assault on the business of art — just like so many fintech startups tried to attack the financial markets — simply won’t work.
ATO is the asset management solution for the art world.
It discourages counterfeits through community tooled A.I.(deep learning) and artist-supported tracking. In simple terms: it authenticates, tracks, and provides artists with a valuable new income stream.
ATO supplies the tech resources for artists to manage their creative careers and bodies of work with several robust analytic tools rolling out next year. They will help artists make decisions around their sales, marketing, and more. The financial windfall for patrons and collectors is very attractive. What was once an uncertain and untraceable collection may now be managed much like any of their other investment portfolios. With ATO, buyers and collectors leapfrog from having an unverifiable price to having an authenticated Bloomberg-style investor’s report on their collection. ATO Platform has nearing 600 registered works with almost 90 artists using the platform and growing daily.
The core of ATO’s mission is to advance artists’ careers while demystifying the experience of collecting art. The founder, Carrie Christine Eldridge, has developed the holistic art asset management business model advised by an impressive list of executives, board members, and advisors. Eldridge is a former wealth manager at Morgan Stanley and one of the very few black female founders in the blockchain and art space. This is not your usual “new venture team”. Lisa Koonce — Advisor with 35 years of experience in the art industry; Bennet Grutman — Chair of the Board with over 40 years of experience in the art industry; blockchain governance prepared by Prysm Group — an economic advising firm, including the 2017 Nobel Prize winner in economics; and CTO Benjamin Stewart have launched the platform on the leading Polkadot parachain, Moonbeam.
Why Polkadot and Moonbeam?
Specialization
Each parachain’s role is to be the best at its specific job. This frees us to focus on doing the best work possible in Artwork Provenance Validation without being sidetracked by having to build out intermediate-step tooling. Substrate’s modular design allows for easier programming and customization.
Forkless Upgrades
- On-chain governance as a resolution layer for contentious re-orgs.
- Ability to add staking as an incentive mechanism.
- Access to off-chain data via off-chain workers.
- Easy onramp into Polkadot and its shared security model.
- Won’t be unintentionally rate-limited by high transaction volume by some other dapp on the same chain (as with Ethereum).
Cost
From smart contract development to the cost of recording data or “gas”, the entire infrastructure of Polkadot is superior to Ethereum from the ground up. Currently, it only costs about seven cents to record a list of data and parameters of an individual piece of artwork on the Blockchain via Moonbeam. In comparison to an NFT on the Ethereum Blockchain, the average cost in 2021 was about $121. Even with the new Proof of Stake on Ethereum with a new low cost of $10 to mint, it still is drastically more than Polkadot. Polkadot makes it thousands of times cheaper to record.
Greenhouse Gas
The lower cost to record data for artists translates to less computational power overall. Compared to Ethereum’s 84.4 TWh per year, Polkadot and Moonbeam’s energy consumption of 0.00112 TWh is negligible. ATO decided it was worth abandoning the work on the Ethereum blockchain to follow Gavin Wood, the founder of Polkadot, even when Moonbeam hadn’t been announced yet. The ATO team thought it would have to win a bid to buy a parachain. Naturally the team was thrilled learning about Moonbeam.
We love Moonbeam
Moonbeam is a platform for building cross-chain connected applications with superior user experiences. By unifying access to users, assets, and services across any existing blockchain, Moonbeam is paving the way for the next generation of decentralized applications by allowing developers to tap into multiple blockchains from one application experience.
The Moonbeam platform uses integrated cross-chain messaging to allow developers to create smart contracts that access services across many remote blockchains. This approach, plus Moonbeam’s developer-friendly EVM platform, vast tool support, and modern Substrate architecture, creates the ideal development environment for building connected applications.
ATO engineers were anticipating the launch of Moonbeam since it was first rumored online. In 2021 Carrie Eldridge met Derek Yoo, CEO of PureStake and Founder of Moonbeam, in Miami. Since then, ATO has worked continuously with the PureStake team and Moonbeam community. Beyond the fantastic team and their culture, the ease of building the robust smart contracts cut costs significantly and saved the engineers’ time.
Network Effects
Plug into the community of other. projects building on top of each others specialized uses. This reduces the time and effort needed for community and branding.
Piggy-back Consensus
Offload the burden of running full nodes to Polkadot tech-savvy Proof of Stake Validator community.
Master Plan
ATO began with a Proof of Authority chain where the initial set of authorities sign off on Artwork/Artist data that gets on the chain. After reaching a critical mass, ATO will start upgrading the chain towards increased decentralization. Each upgrade is a hugely marketable event and will introduce public investment. In years to come, this network could become a full-fledged Decentralized Autonomous Organization of artwork collectors, dealers, and speculators.
Letting the numbers talk
ATO’s primary revenue streams are from the tagging and tracking of physical and digital art along with retaining a portion of royalties collected. Active since 2016, ATO has consistently been at the forefront of developments in blockchain and art. The company engages across the entire value chain — artists (and their art schools), dealer intermediaries, and buyer collectors.
Where does this confidence come from? In 2018, ATO Gallery facilitated the world record sale for the most expensive physical artwork ever purchased with Bitcoin. “As we launch the ATO Platform, high-value collectors will continue to turn to us to securely track transactions and their art price appreciation,” noted Eldridge.
