Sotheby’s launches Secondary NFT Marketplace
The Alpha:
- Today, legacy auction house Sotheby’s launched its own secondary marketplace for art NFTs, according to information shared exclusively with nft now.
- The marketplace is an extension of Sotheby’s Metaverse, the company’s platform for digital artworks and collectibles. The peer-to-peer marketplace will feature chain-wide sales showcasing a rotating selection of high-profile Web3 artists curated by Sotheby’s specialists. All transactions will take place on the Ethereum and Polygon networks. Collectors will be able to purchase works on the platform with ETH or MATIC.
- To inaugurate the marketplace’s launch, Sotheby’s is offering collectors a chance to buy and list works by 13 Web3-defining artists, including Tyler Hobbs, XCOPY, Claire Silver, Diana Sinclair, Sam Spratt, Pindar Van Arman and more.
Dive deeper
When Sotheby’s makes a move in Web3, people pay attention. The auction house has facilitated some of the most historic sales in the NFT world’s existence. Perhaps the most notable of these was Pak’s $17 million auction with the company in April 2021 and the first of the auction house’s Natively Digital series in June of that year. Natively Digital saw Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s Quantum, the first NFT ever made, sell for over a million dollars. Recognizing the importance of the Web3 movement in the art world, the company launched Sotheby’s Metaverse in October 2021 and hasn’t looked back since.
“When Sotheby’s Metaverse was first launched more than a year ago, our goal was to bring to market a first-of-its-kind platform that would be characterized by the expertise and vision of our specialists to curate sales of NFTs,” Sebastian Fahey, Sotheby’s managing director, EMEA, and head of Metaverse said in a press release shared with nft now.
“Now, we continue to advance and evolve our platform to provide new and more seamless ways for the community to discover and collect new forms of digital collectibles, from limited edition NFTs to unique works by artists who are redefining perceptions of digital art. “
The new secondary marketplace will feature a rotating selection of artists’ works selected by Sotheby’s digital art specialists. The first 13 artists included in the platform’s launch are Tyler Hobbs, Claire Silver, XCOPY, Diana Sinclair, IX Shells, Sarah Zucker, Refik Anadol, Sofia Crespo, Sam Spratt, Pindar van Arman, Osinachi, Hackatao and Sebastião Salgado.
The issue of royalties
Due to the success the platform has seen through its primary sales initiatives, Sotheby’s Metaverse is now trying to establish itself as the best art platform for the secondary market as well.
As such, it is deliberate in how it handles the hot button issue of artist royalties in the NFT ecosystem. The auction house says it will honor artist royalties on its secondary platform via smart contracts on the market and in accordance with artists’ stated on-chain royalty rate. The decision to support artists in this way comes at a time when platforms are reducing the amount of royalties they pay out to artists in an attempt to attract more users and gain a majority share of market volume.
Royalties have played a huge role in building the crypto art community over the years and have served as one of Web3’s main draws for artists looking to earn a sustainable income from their work. In response to platforms like OpenSea and Blur reducing royalty enforcement in recent months, more and more creatives have begun calling for the creation of independent and artist-led marketplaces focused on protecting their interests.
“Sotheby’s commitment to honoring artist royalties comes amid a larger debate about royalties in the NFT community and signals Sotheby’s artist-first ethos as one of the only major NFT marketplaces committed to artist resale royalties,” it said in the press release about the policy.
What will be next
In June, Sotheby’s will also establish a new digital art gallery through the art gallery platform Web3 oncyber, which will exhibit selected works from the secondary market. For the launch of the oncyber gallery, Sotheby’s Metaverse is collaborating with a well-known digital art collector Cozomo de’ Mediciwho will curate one of the gallery’s rooms to display a selection of works from their renowned collection.
The news about the marketplace and the oncyber gallery comes in the wake of controversy for Sotheby’s. In April 2023, the company faced heated criticism when it announced the latest edition of its Natively Digital series, a show honoring glitch artists in the NFT sphere that featured no female artists. After public outcry, Sotheby’s quickly halted and relaunched the show with one more diverse lineup.
Along with the fact that volumes in the NFT market is at a 20-month low, and floor prices for even the most sought-after art collections have also fallen sharply, Sotheby’s secondary marketplace is entering the scene at a difficult time.
