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ARTICLE · 20 NOVEMBER 2018

The Hammer Falls On The First Major Blockchain-Based Art Auction

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Christie's made history again last night during its evening sale, An American Place: The Barney A. Ebsworth Collection, at 20 Rockefeller Center in New York.

United StatesTechnology
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Christie's made history again last night during its evening sale, An American Place: The Barney A. Ebsworth Collection, at 20 Rockefeller Center in New York. This time, the history was not in the form of a record-setting sale (though the sale brought in $317.8 million), but as the first major art auction to be recorded by distributed ledger technology. Christie's teamed with Artory, a company that operates an art-focused, blockchain-based registry, to securely register and track the provenance of over 90 artworks that were offered in the sale.

It is no secret that forgeries and fake (or the lack of) provenance have plagued the art market. Experts in the art industry estimate that up to 50% of the artworks in circulation are fake. An expert at the Fine Arts Expert Institute in Geneva believes that "if anything, [that figure is] an underestimate." Artnet referred to 2016 as "The Year of the Fake" due to scandals involving sales of 25 Old Master paintings totaling

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