Everledger, the London-based startup known for uploading specifications on 980,000 diamonds onto the bitcoin blockchain, has announced a partnership with Vastari, a fine art and exhibition database.
“Everledger and Vastari are a natural fit as we’re both in the business of protecting provenance," said Leanne Kemp, co-founder and CEO of Everledger. "For us it’s about creating a permanent record to protect authenticity of an item, for Vastari it’s guaranteeing an item’s provenance while it’s mobile.”
Vastari, in which Everledger holds an investment stake, acts as a middleman between art museums that are looking for new pieces and private art collectors that want to increase the value of their art by getting it exhibited in public. This new partnership will see the art information possessed by Vastari written immutably to the blockchain.
Kemp explained that the data is written into the public blockchain, as well as Everledger’s own permissioned ledger.
“Having a permissioned ledger allows us to better serve industry," said Kemp. "It creates a system where accessible permissions are tightly controlled, with rights to modify or even read the blockchain state are restricted to a few users, while still maintaining many kinds of partial guarantees of authenticity and decentralization that blockchains [permit]."
She explained that each art institution on the permissioned ledger could be considered a separate node.
“One might imagine a consortium of 15 art institutions, each of which operates a node and of which 10 must sign every block in order for the block to be valid,” Kemp said. Ambiguous assets
While Everledger had success with diamonds because of the gems’ clear cut characteristics, fine art is a different beast. Bernadine Bröcker, Director at Vastari, explained that there are four things that are looked in art.“There are key factors that are tracked on every piece of art,” Bröcker said. “The provenance, which is […]
