Large art auction houses investigate how to apply blockchain in their business model
The big auction houses like Sotheby's or Christie's are investigating the application of blockchain in their business model, as explained yesterday by Rafael del Castillo Ionov, lawyer and expert in international transactions with cryptocurrencies.
Del Castillo uttered these words during the celebration of the round table "Art, culture and blockchain: the new legal challenges", organized by the Cultural Law Association (ADC), in collaboration with the Villanueva University Center of Madrid. Cristina Castillo-Tercero, an expert in Industrial and Intellectual Property, also participated with Del Castillo; Miguel Ángel Recio, specialist in cultural management, and lawyer and journalist Rafael Delgado Maldonado de Guevara, president of ADC and expert in Historical Heritage.
Del Castillo addressed the application of blockchain in the cultural and creative industries from a legal and commercial point of view, and explained that the chain of blocks will seriously affect the intermediating role played by auction houses. This lawyer, who holds the position of deputy general manager for corporate and legal matters at RusHydro, said that Sotheby's had a turnover of more than 4,000 million dollars in 2016, acting as an intermediary between buyers and sellers to authenticate and value works of art and ensure the transaction of them. "Blockchain technology allows the creation of digital certificate records of authenticity and origin that allow verifying the authenticity of a work of art and offering a historical record of that work over time," explained Del Castillo.
Del Castillo said that the art galleries will have to reinvent themselves, if they do not want to disappear, and cited the case of the Maecenas company, the blockchain company that is democratizing access to works of art, dividing each painting into fragments that can be acquired with tokens
The Spanish lawyer also referred to tokenization and its significance for the cultural and creative industries:
Operators will be able to finance their projects through an Initial Currency Offer (ICO), which will make it possible to convert artistic pieces of low liquidity and high value into negotiable financial units with greater liquidity, as if they were shares of a company. It is a genuine process of democratization of access to art that would no longer be reserved for large estates as an investment asset.
Del Castillo, Spanish father and Russian mother, with an office in Russia, Spain and Switzerland, is about to publish a book on ICO and tokenization of the economy, where it will address the legal problems of them. His proposal goes through the creation of a regime that provides legal security and allows to unleash the full potential of the blockchain.
In his turn to speak, Martínez-Tercero spoke of the impact of blockchain on intellectual property and related the great contributions that the block chain will bring in the field of copyright; among them, a fairer model of retribution of creations automatically. He also explained its application in the control of the distribution chain and in the fight against counterfeits
The intervention of Recio, meanwhile, revolved around the need to address the modernization of culture to adapt it to the world we live in and make it much more expansive. Recio, who has held the position of general director of Fine Arts and Cultural Assets, Archives and Libraries of Spain, explained that cultural industries account for 3.5% of Spanish GDP and referred to this country as a great heritage power.