Blockchain Revolution

Profile of the Next-Gen Art Patron: Redefining Money
Now Don owns a percentage interest in the rights of an artistic rendering of a euro.
When the physical work sells, the artist, the venue, Don, and his virtual patrons all
receive a portion of the sale according to their level of participation. In other words,
patron participation matters. Patrons who interact with the artist and the work, who
share their appreciation in social networks, who spark others to engage with both

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artist and art, and who essentially serve to promote the artist’s brand, receive more
than does a passive patron who viewed it once online and bought a stake. We’re not
sure whether writing about it in this book counts directly toward Don’s participation
points. Artlery wants signals of appreciation—in the form of positive references to
artists and their works—to correlate with the appreciation in value of the work itself,
and so perhaps future platform releases will take examples like ours into account.
Artlery is initially concentrating on gifting a percentage of each piece’s sale. Future
releases of the platform will allow patrons to purchase ownership stakes in artwork
directly, perhaps sharing portions of subscription royalty revenue or copyright
licensing of the work.
By involving multiple parties directly, including patrons, in the process, and
engaging them as stakeholders, Artlery is focusing more eyes on accounting. The
blockchain as a public, distributed ledger ensures open, accurate, and timely
processing of transactions. As payouts expand beyond first sale, secondary sale, and
subsidiary rights such as prints and merchandising, individual artists will never be
acting alone. They will have a community of patron stakeholders behind them to
negotiate and enforce their contractual rights.
Artlery utilizes the bitcoin blockchain in several ways. First, it registers the
provenance of the art as metadata on the blockchain through a partnership and API
integration with another bitcoin start-up, Ascribe.io, and it uploads the payout table so
that all stakeholders are paid immediately according to their asset shares with
immediate transparency for all parties. It is exploring various techniques for encoding
this information, such as a bitcoin script inside transactions. While its initial target
market is fine art, Artlery has significant traction in other copyright industries such as
music, books, and movies, which it will target through the release of its own API.