Most of the market built a trading system. The object was never the point.
Every system built for real-world assets fails at the same place: the record. The money is in the transaction, not in the object, so that is what got built. Issuing a token against a thing is easy. Establishing what the thing is, who holds it, and what has happened to it, in a form that survives institutions and decades, is the hard part.
A record held in pieces
A work's record is not in one place, and it never has been. The artist holds part of it. So do the gallery, the museum, the appraiser, the auction house, the people who move it, the people who store it, and whoever owns it now. Each of them is holding a piece the others cannot see, in a filing cabinet, an inbox, or a system belonging to whichever company they happened to be using at the time.
That is not a technology failure to begin with. It is that nobody has ever been responsible for the whole thing.
The record exists as the sum of people who each know part of it, and it loses a little every time one of them changes systems, changes hands, or closes.
The Markmaker Object Record
This is what we build. A durable account of what an object is, who made and holds it, and what rights travel with it, designed to be read independently of whoever issued it.
What that is for: transparency in places where it used to be expensive or impossible, a transaction that is not trapped inside the platform it happened on, and a record that can still be read after the companies and platforms of today are gone, so that whatever replaces them can pick it up.
Built to outlast its own parts
A record meant to outlive the platform that issued it cannot rest on any one piece of technology, because the technology will be replaced long before the record is.
Some things belong on a blockchain. Most do not. Some things belong in permanent storage, and some things cannot legally go there at all, because permanent means it cannot be deleted and people have a right to have their data removed. So the work is not picking one technology and building everything on top of it. It is deciding, case by case, which tool is the right one, and building so that any of them can be replaced when something better arrives.
Digital identification
A record has to say who. Who made this, who holds it now, who is acting for them. That is harder than it sounds, because online a person is not reliably one thing.
An artist with three wallets is three identities as far as any system can tell. There is no accepted way to say they are the same person, and not for want of trying, so the work splits across them and nothing adds up. For a gallery or a brand it is the same problem carrying more weight.
What is needed is the reverse of what exists: one identity for the person, with the wallets, accounts and profiles they use hanging off it rather than standing in for it.
Cultural heritage records
Heritage records have to outlast the institutions that hold them. A department closes, a system is replaced, a collection is moved or split, and the object is still there needing an account of itself.
They also carry weight a commercial record does not. Not all of what they hold should be public, because an inventory of what a community has is also a map to it. And when an object is lost, damaged or taken, the record is what remains of it.
Art platforms and systems
The art market runs on systems that were never built to talk to each other. A gallery's inventory, a fair's catalog, an auction result, a conservator's report, a shipper's manifest: each holds a piece of the truth about the same object, and none of them holds all of it. We design and build the platforms this work runs on, with the record as the part meant to outlive the software.
Real-world object systems
None of this is specific to art. Anything physical that changes hands, moves, is restored, insured or resold needs a record that holds up outside the system that made it. Art is where the standard of proof is set by registrars rather than engineers, so a record built to survive that scrutiny travels well beyond art.
Keep up with the work
New writing on the record layer, notes from the work, and news about what we are building.
Subscribe