Christie’s joins the chain with a new NFT marketplace
The Alpha:
- After hosting several successful high-ticket NFT auctions, renowned auction house Christie’s has just announced in a press release shared with nft, the launch of Christie’s 3.0.
- This new platform will enable the legacy auction house to conduct NFT sales across the chain – ensuring that “all transactions – including post-sale processing – will be automated and on-chain,” Christie’s director of digital art sales Nicole Sales Giles said in an interview with nft now.
- This announcement comes in the wake of the Ethereum Merger, which cut the Ethereum blockchain’s energy usage by more than 99 percent.
- Manifold, Chainalysis and Spatial jointly built Christie’s new on-chain marketplace. Scheduled for the platform’s first sale are nine NFTs by Diana Sinclair, one of the NFT space’s top young artists.
Why it matters
While it remains unclear whether Christie’s 3.0 will become an on-chain NFT marketplace – hosting images of the NFT artworks 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 reinforce one of the critical advantages NFT sales transacted via the blockchain have over sales conducted on Web2 platforms: transparency.
Every NFT sale transaction made on Christie’s 3.0 will be automatically recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. In practice, this will make it possible to carry out “auctions on the Ethereum blockchain network from start to finish”, according to the press release shared with nft now. Thanks to this, the creators of the high-ticket NFTs auctioned off on this new platform will be able to track exactly where their precious NFT works end up.
What will be next
Of course, it would only make sense to pair the announcement of this new marketplace with an initial sale. Headlining the launch of Christie’s 3.0 are nine new NFT pieces from crypto-art superstar Diana Sinclair. A firm believer in 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 the way forward for more young artists to enter the NFT area in as frictionless a way as possible. “We hope 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 at Christie’s stage,” Sales Giles said.
With the recent Ethereum merger, that lofty goal feels remarkably within reach. Speaking about the timing of Christie’s 3.0 launch, Sales Giles noted: “The merger was such a hugely important milestone for the Ethereum network. By ushering in a new era of sustainability and transaction speeds, the merger enables both consignors and buyers to […] get excited. Although we have been building Christie’s 3.0 for some time, given these benefits, we felt now was the right time to launch.”
