DADA and Blockchain: A Love Affair

Dada.nyc has been around in its current incarnation as a visual conversation platform for about four years. We tried different ways to monetize the wonderful art created by our global community of artists. We did merchandising, we crowdsourced illustrations, we explored royalty-free licensing; all worthy pursuits, but they fell short of our ambitions to truly scale the possibility of artists worldwide making a living through art making.

Visual conversation by different artists at dada.nyc

Then Beatriz, our founder, went to Ethereal Summit in May 2017 and realized that blockchain was the answer for DADA.
Here was a system that could finally turn infinitely reproducible digital content into unique digital assets with intellectual property protection for artists and proof of ownership for collectors. It was love at first sight.

Visual conversation by Moxarra and @opheliafu

By October of 2017, we had launched our first collection of provably rare digital art made by artists on DADA. We were one of the pioneers in the space of rare digital art.

A year later, Beatriz was invited to speak about The End of The Starving Artist at Ethereal Summit.

Now we are integrating the entirety of our collection of almost 100,000 drawings into a seamless marketplace where artists on DADA will be able to get income from the drawings they make at DADA for pleasure.

Thanks to blockchain DADA’s vast collection of digital artworks can be freely traded, bought and sold as provably unique digital assets with IP protection for artists and proof of ownership for collectors. Blockchain is a natural fit to market our digital content with safety, transparency, and fairness for both content creators and collectors because it is decentralized and can safeguard attribution, provenance, and the whereabouts of digital assets.

But blockchain allows for much more than digital art marketplaces. Blockchain gives DADA the opportunity to transform our community into an innovative economy that offers artists the freedom to do what they love, letting artists on DADA take full control of their IP, and our community to self-govern and achieve economic independence.

Visual conversation by artists at dada.nyc

It has the potential to truly change the scope of the art world as we know it. Art is no longer relevant to most people’s lives. The art market has rendered art unapproachable, unaffordable and intimidating for the vast majority of people. People are disconnected from their own artistic inclinations and society discourages them from pursuing the creation of art.

Visual conversation by artists at dada.nyc

Put simply, DADA brings art back to the lives of millions of people, in a community where everyone is welcome to draw, appreciate art, collect it, and participate in its creation. The value created will be redistributed to all value creators.

This is why we are in love with blockchain.