According to thierry Ehrmann, Artmarket.com’s CEO and founder of Artprice and Server group, “Since 1987 our group has developed an unparalleled legitimacy in knowledge of the art market but also in knowledge of its cyber dimensions. Indeed, faithful to our primary raison d’être, we have made a major contribution to the development of the art market’s digital sphere, notably by dematerializing and elucidating this historically opaque market.”

Artprice by Artmarket’s Metaverse will be an immersive destination for collectors and digital art enthusiasts based on a rigorous selection of NFTs and offering the necessary experience and guarantees for this type of ecosystem, where Artprice and its reference shareholder, Groupe Serveur, have been clairvoyant pioneers of the internet since 1987. Few groups have been cited in Time Magazine as such.

For almost a year now Artprice by Artmarket has been the subject of numerous spontaneous offers for partnerships, mergers, acquisitions (partial or complete) in the light of the emerging and considerable market for Non-Fungible Tokens. NFTs (as they are known) are collectible digital products stored on a blockchain.

Naturally, the NFT merchants are seeking additional credibility and a value-creation logic specific to the online art market. And, of course, they want to find artists already identified by their market performance as well as credible and financially solid buyers and sellers.

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In short, these players would benefit enormously from the backing and support of Artprice as a World Leader in Art Market Information with its 5.4 million members and its Marketplace created in 2005 offering more than 72,000 works online in real time and its database covering 765,000 artists. For the fierce competitors in the NFT market, Artprice by Artmarket represents the ideal guarantor of global success.

In order to meet the urgent and vital needs of NFT competitors and other art market players wishing to participate in the digital art market, Artprice by Artmarket is preparing – as announced in its latest financial press releases – its own NFT platform integrating all of the processes and industrial services. Its domain names are already registered as artprice-nft.com and artmarket-nft.com

In the future, Artprice’s Standardized Marketplace could generate an income in the tens of millions of euros justifying a capitalization in line with those of recently listed blockchain players like Crypto Blockchain Industry (CBI). This income is based, among other things, on the various recurring payables (in physical currencies) that are inherent to the industrial processes underlying the Blockchain/NFT economy.

As we have all seen, there has been a veritable flood of media attention on the NFT phenomenon and all of the art market’s major players have rushed to incorporate NFTs, at any cost, into their economic model, including Christie’s and Sotheby’s, the latter having announced the creation of its NFT platform, Sotheby’s Metaverse, on 14 October 2021.

With the support of its various specialized departments, Artprice by Artmarket has conducted in-depth studies and analyses into the NFT phenomenon and is consequently acutely aware that the field is substantially more complex than it appears.

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In the first place, you need Blockchain know-how, an area that Artprice has been working on for several years and which has earned it ‘Innovative Company’ label twice, awarded by France’s Public Investment Bank (BPI).

In terms of infrastructure, any potential player in this field would need clean rooms and its entire Operating System in proprietary mode. Then they would need to have excellent knowledge of the history and management of crypto-currencies and of the Wallet system to avoid traps. Lastly, they would need expertise in art history specialised in the origins of the Internet and cyberculture, in order to identify what constitutes digital fine art. These different types of knowledge require skills that are both vertical and transversal.

In its various projections and models, Artprice by Artmarket has examined the veritable profit centers within the entire NFT process / knowledge chain. It has notably focused on the functional and economic reality of operating a platform with  primary NFT issuers, and the buy and sell side of NFTs on the secondary market. Great efforts were made to identify and distinguish between the various recurring revenue items and those which are subject to the vagaries of the market, and it has also been revealed that from an accounting stance, the recurring and income generating activities are primarily accessible in dollars or euros.

What transpires very clearly indeed is that the main players in NFTs are above all major players in the crypto-currencies field. To ignore this filiation would be a major error in the comprehension of this ecosystem, which few people really master.

Artmarket.com has therefore carefully examined the main sales that have contributed to the notoriety of NFTs and it finds the same players in both cryptocurrencies and NFTs, with the latter representing a way out of cryptocurrency via a non-fungible asset. This analysis is essential because it highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the early players in the crypto universe.

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The sale of the first digital work at Christie’s had the effect of an earthquake by propelling BEEPLE (alias Mike Winkelmann) – unknown to anyone outside the digital art sphere – to third place on the auction results podium for living artists, behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney. After the record-breaking sale of Everydays: The first 5000 Days, a digital file in JPEG format that fetched the staggering price of $69.3 million on 11 March 2021, digital art must be considered a creative current of tremendous value.

The purpose of this $69.3 million purchase of Everydays: The first 5000 Days by two Indian businessmen was therefore to claim a certain ‘equivalence’ between all countries in the world and to show that buying art is not a field reserved to Western collectors. This parity is ‘enabled’ by the emergence of cryptocurrencies, a logical posture for these two men who made their fortunes with the purchase of Ethereum, one of the hundreds of cryptocurrencies in circulation around the world.

Another branch of Artprice’s research into the NFT market has focused on the legal dimension, and it has concluded that the field raises a large number of legal questions which only a few rare players (like Artprice) are equipped to answer.

One example concerns intellectual property law: everyone agrees that the various transactions involving an NFT artwork clearly record the deeds of ownership; but what about the copyright, patrimonial rights, moral rights, reproduction rights, etc. relating to the primary issue of an NFT. Artprice, through its expertise and experience in this field can respond to this void by creating the necessary bridge between the NFT and the Physical Art Market.

At the ADAGP (French society for the collection and distribution of copyright in the field of graphic and plastic arts), where Artprice by Artmarket is one of the main contributors, NFTs have been the subject of substantial level-headed scrutiny. According to its legal director Thierry Maillard, “It is important to legally secure the link between the NFT and the artist and his/her beneficiaries, to structure the practices and to provide for trusted third parties”. These observations all lead very clearly towards Artprice because Artprice already has the requisite expertise, infrastructure and know-how to handle these delicate issues.

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Likewise, according to Blanche Sousi, Emeritus Professor at the University of Lyon 3, Holder of the Jean Monnet Chair in European Banking and Monetary Law, Honorary Director of the Institute of Law and Business Economics and member of the Scientific Committee of the Institut Art et Droit of which Artprice is a member, the issuance of a primary NFT must comply with the provisions of the Monetary and Financial Code (digital assets in French law or Crypto assets in European law) .

Lastly, concerning the birth of a new art movement, we endorse the analysis of art historian Michael Maizels who has said: ‘I am an art historian who has carried out extensive research on the evolution of the market for ‘recent art’. And I can tell you that something generational is now happening with NFTs.’

At this stage in the game, a solid knowledge is required of cyber-culture and its interaction with the art market for almost forty years, all this, in order to be able to define the emergence of new Contemporary artists whose NFT works appeal to new collectors.

Notwithstanding the media hype surrounding NFTs, it is important to identify the different areas of knowledge (which can only be acquired over time) necessary for an effective and profitable activity in this area. After which, an NFT Marketplace can be founded and capture the recurring and highly profitable revenues that this market will generate in physical currency (i.e. Euros / Dollars) in order to hedge against a crypto-exchange risk and a tax system that is clearly ‘a work in progress’.

So, on the demand side, Artprice’s global clientele will be ready to take the plunge as soon as they feel secure about their transactions, and on the supply side, Artprice is confident that it can attract artists for the creation of their NFTs on the primary issue market.

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On the broader art market, it is now clear that all the major operators feel an imperative need to base their credibility on macro and microeconomic data with a sharp analysis of the market. This type of credibility is precisely what Artprice by Artmarket can bring to them in its role as a Global Leader in Art Market Information for nearly 25 years – via reports, indices, graphs and data (used by more than 7,200 print and digital media).

Confidence in NFTs can only come from a player that has been monitoring and mastering the art market’s economy with its exponential development since 2000 (turnover up 2,700% in the Contemporary art field).

Artprice by Artmarket considers that digital art undoubtedly represents a paradigm shift. However it also considers that only a few rare players will be able to offer an integrated and coherent industrial chain of processes and services with the right legal environments, the right economic and financial analysis, and, of course, the right kind of customer pedagogy which is absolutely essential to creating confidence in this Metaverse (future version of the Internet initiated by the vision of Neal Stephenson in 1992 in his post-apocalyptic cyberpunk universe of ‘Snow crash’).

Artprice by Artmarket can elucidate the real protagonists of cyber culture who were immersed in the digital world long before anyone else. Artprice and Groupe Serveur, its major shareholder, envisaged the birth of this new world in 1987.

Artprice by Artmarket’s head office is the world-renowned Organe Museum of Contemporary Art that manages the Demeure du Chaos / Abode of Chaos (dixit the NYT) which is cited in art history literature as one of the most important references of the post-apocalyptic cyberpunk universe (subject of over 3,600 media reports in 21 years). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Demeure du Chaos / Abode of Chaos plans to issue thousands of NFTs by its sole author, thierry Ehrmann, an artist/sculptor and Founder of Artprice and Server group (link to biography in Who’s Who France).

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Biographie_nov2020_WhosWho_thierryEhrmann.pdf

The paradigm shift that the arrival of NFTs represents suggests it will take several decades to define which bodies / authorities / institutions / experts will emerge as being authoritative with respect to digital art creations and the definition of the cognitive value of digital artworks. Artprice by Artmarket is among the few rare players who stand positioned to engage in such a commitment.

Artprice by Artmarket will select its artists and NFT works from its Marketplace to convey its vision of digital art.

According to research conducted by Artprice by Artmarket, the most popular NFT platforms for artists are OpenSea, SuperRare, Nifty Gateway, Rarible, Known Origin, Hic et Nunc (the least energy-consuming).

Also read Contemporary art auctions boosted by NFTs (Artprice report) (AFP) 2021

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Online sales are now an integral part of auction house strategies. Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips have dematerialized just over half of their operations. But it’s not just the majors ones; the online proportion for the world’s auction houses taken as a whole is currently 41% for 2021. A new step has clearly been taken with the thunderous arrival of NFTs.

According to Artprice’s Contemporary Art Market Annual Report published last Monday, Contemporary art auctions reached a historic turnover level of $2.7 billion in the 2020-2021 period (end-June to beginning-July), boosted by NFTs and online auctions.

For Artmarket.com, all options are on the table, including the other hypothesis: an immediate partnership with a major NFT platform. This would generate huge saving in time and the economies of scale would therefore produce an immediate financial gain with a rapid boost in net income that would be added to a distinctly profitable balance sheet, and would therefore will be a significant growth driver.

The Artprice by Artmarket® NFT marketplace benefits notably from the domain names ‘Artmarket.com, Artmarket.net, Artmarket.org’ which naturally capture searches using the terms Art Market ( English being the language of the Art Market). With a simple search ‘art market’, the top 12 unsponsored natural results out of 3.33 billion results on Google.com lead to Artprice by Artmarket’s databases.

Finally, it is essential to remember that with Artprice and Cision (PR Newswire), Artprice by Artmarket’s Marketplace will benefit from the first press agency dedicated to Art Market information: Artpress agency® is a press agency created in 1999 and 100% owned by Artprice, the World Leader in Art Market Information.

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For 120 years Cision has gradually built a global network for the dissemination of information / news recognized by more than 100,000 well-known clients on financial markets.

Cision is the world leader in PR & Influence software and media research.

With its database of 1.6 million journalists and media organisations, Cision delivers qualitative information concerning the daily information generated by Artprice by Artmarket to a target population 450 million through its press agency Artpress Agency in the native language of each country on all five continents.

The agreement is the direct result of a long relationship spanning two decades between Artprice and Cision, two powerful leaders in their respective markets.

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