Christie’s Is Going On-Chain With a New NFT Marketplace

The Alpha:

• Following the hosting of several successful high-ticket NFT auctions, esteemed auction house Christie’s just announced in a press release shared with nft now the launch of Christie’s 3.0.
• This new platform will enable the legacy auction house to conduct fully on-chain NFT sales — ensuring that “all transactions — including post-sale processing — will be automated and on-chain,” said Christie’s Director of Digital Art Sales Nicole Sales Giles in an interview with nft now.
• This announcement comes in the wake of the Ethereum Merge, which cut down the Ethereum blockchain’s energy usage by more than 99 percent.
• Manifold, Chainalysis, and Spatial collaboratively built Christie’s new on-chain marketplace. Slated for the platform’s inaugural sale are nine NFTs by Diana Sinclair, one of the NFT space’s best young artists.

Why it matters

Although it remains unclear if Christie’s 3.0 will become a fully on-chain NFT marketplace — which hosts images of the NFT art pieces on the blockchain — the launch of Christie’s 3.0 is set to make the auction house an even more important player in the NFT landscape. Why? The move will amplify one of the critical advantages NFT sales transacted via the blockchain have over sales executed on Web2 platforms: transparency.

Every transaction surrounding NFT sales conducted on Christie’s 3.0 will be automatically registered on the Ethereum blockchain. In practice, this would enable “auctions to be carried out on the Ethereum blockchain network from start to finish,” according to the press release shared with nft now. Thanks to this, creators of the high-ticket NFTs auctioned off on this new platform will be able to track where exactly their prized NFT works end up.

What’s next

Of course, it would only make sense to pair the announcement of this new marketplace with an inaugural sale. Spearheading the launch of Christie’s 3.0 are nine new NFT pieces from crypto art superstar Diana Sinclair. A firm believer of how “the next renaissance will grow from the intersection of art and technology,” read the press release, Sinclair will serve as a fitting ambassador for the Web3-forward future of Christie’s.

Through this launch, Christie’s hopes to pave a way forward for more young artists to enter the NFT space in as frictionless a manner as possible. “We are hoping to create a platform where collectors can discover and collect the best digital artworks by the most sought-after artists. Christie’s 3.0 will enable us to scale our digital art programming and work with more emerging digital artists to amplify their voices on the Christie’s stage,” said Sales Giles.

With the recent Ethereum Merge, that lofty goal feels remarkably within reach. Speaking on the timing of Christie’s 3.0 launch, Sales Giles remarked, “The Merge was such a tremendously important milestone for the Ethereum network. By ushering in a new era of sustainability and transaction speeds, the Merge allows for both consignors and buyers to […] get excited. While we have been building Christie’s 3.0 for some time, given these benefits, we felt now was the right time to launch.”

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