Art Auction Giant Sotheby’s Unveils On-Chain NFT Secondary Marketplace

screenshot-2023-05-02-at-1-1 — *blood in the streets, late to the ball* by Claire Silver. Source: metaverse.sothebys.com

Major auction house Sotheby’s has launched a non-fungible token (NFT) secondary marketplace that allows users to buy curated NFTs on the Ethereum (ETH) and Polygon (MATIC) networks.

The sales system will be integrated and fully on-chain, enabling the buyers to pay in ETH or MATIC, the native token of the two blockchains.

Furthermore, Sotheby’s Metaverse, which is the art auction house’s Web3 arm, will allow direct transactions between the platform’s users.

There is a 2.5% seller fee, it added, while artist resale royalties will be honored directly on-chain through marketplace smart contracts.

The platform will automatically pay artists according to the royalty rate they select.

However, “NFT owners are also free to take their NFTs to other exchanges that don’t honor royalties,” Forbes reported.

Thirteen previously approved artists are allowed to sell their NFTs even before Sotheby’s has seen them, meaning they don’t have to run the art by the auction house.

They’ll be able to sell existing and yet-to-be-created artworks.

The artists include Tyler Hobbs, Claire Silver, Sarah Zucker, XCOPYPY -0.1%, Diana Sinclair, IX Shells, Refik Anadol, Sofia Crespo, Sam Spratt, Pindar van Arman, Osinachi, Hackatao, and Sebastião Salgado.

“The opportunity to expand Sotheby’s Metaverse with a fully on-chain peer-to-peer market is an important step forward in our evolution within the digital art and collectible space,” said in a press release Michael Bouhanna, Sotheby’s vice president and head of NFTs and digital art.

The nearly 300-year-old auction house entered the NFT space back in April 2021 and even housed several record-breaking sales that year, such as a CryptoPunk that sold for $11.8 million and a Bored Ape Yacht Club piece that sold for 3.4 million.

More recently, in March this year, Sotheby’s hosted a benefit auction in honor of International Women’s Day, titled “My Body, My Business,” in collaboration with UnicornDAO, a collectors’ decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) devoted to women’s and gender-fluid NFTs.

In mid-April, the house revived its “Glitch: Beyond Binary” NFT auction after facing backlash over the lack of diversity with the initial launch.

Several days later, it was revealed that Sotheby’s was preparing to host an auction for a collection of the NFTs seized from the now-defunct crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC).

Sotheby’s said it would auction the Grails collection, comprised of digital artwork that belonged to 3AC and its Starry Night Capital NFT-collecting fund, in a bid to recoup a portion of the $3 billion the collapsed fund owes to creditors.

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