The art market has long been one of the most dynamic and compelling of markets, but identifying the provenance, history or value of an artwork is often a challenge. Smartefact is a distributed digital identity platform for Art that leverages blockchain technologies and NFC capabilities in order to enable art galleries, museums, auction houses, experts, collectors, and artists to create a decentralized digital identity for any types of artwork, both physical and digital, in order to facilitate the ownership, the authentication, and the management of collections.
Smartefact aims at reshaping the art world by redefining how we buy, sell, trade, and create art in 2021. And while Smartefact does not replace existing certification practices, it is a great and cost-effective complement to them. It allows to register in the blockchain an artwork's core data such as authorship and ownership, as well as historical and trading records such as exhibitions, sales, and expertise certifications. These records can then be read from the blockchain using the free Smartefact mobile application available on both Android and iOS devices.
For any digital identity system to work, a robust chain of trust is needed. This becomes even more challenging when trying to create a decentralized digital identity system. To resolve the challenge of storing trust data for data and objects, which representations are stored in the blockchain, Smartefact has opted for the secure Emer blockchain, because it offers a number of significant benefits over other blockchains, including a name-value storage (NVS) service. Using NVS, Smartefact has created a new protocol called EmerCert, which is an innovative protocol that allows to build tagged hierarchical trust structures and calculate trust for certain nodes based on tags. The objects of the system are records of the name-value storage (NVS) stored in the blockchain. Smartefact is the first service of its kind to resolve the chain of trust challenge this way.
The Smartefact platform, its mobile applications, and the EmerCert protocol are developed by Hong Kong technology company EmerTech, a member company of the Incu-App Programme at HKSTP (Hong Kong Science &
Technology Park).
For more information, visit www.smartefact.org
