Analysis of Top Web3 Curated Art Platforms - SnapFingers DAO

Author：memeswap | SnapFingersDAO Builder Twitter@Varian8848

Last year, the global art market generated approximately $65 billion in transactions, not counting NFTs. Art Blocks launched in 2021 as Web3's art NFT curated platform, with sales exceeding $1 billion that same year. As NFTs have gradually entered the public eye, collectors and investment institutions have increasingly started to focus on the art NFTs as an investment, including professional investment institutions such as MUSE0 DAO, Flamingo DAO and Curated Fund. At the same time, more and more top artists and top curatorial incubation teams have emerged in the Web3 space.

So, what is curation? In the NFT world, creating a collection on Opensea is a way to sell NFTs on a marketplace, but selling is not the same as curation. “Curation is the act of creating context”, according to Zora's founder. Curation is not only about promoting and selling NFTs, it is also about the context behind the work, and just as importantly, the building of cultural connections.

For artists, a Web3 curation/incubation platform provides a full range of support. From technical aspects such as NFT contracts and royalty design, to promotion and investor relationships, the platform can support artists in marketing, strategy, storytelling, community and other ways beyond the initial creative concept.
For investors, the art market can seem difficult to understand and uneven, with a large number of low quality works and fraudulent products. The Web3 art curated/incubation platform, because of the team’s experience in the art industry, identifies and only presents outstanding works and provides investors with more reliable investment.

Compared with traditional artworks, NFTs can ensure the authenticity and origin of artworks. All transactions can be tracked and transferred on chain, and the resale rights of creators and collectors can also be guaranteed. Therefore, Blockchain has fixed the illiquidity and hidden transactional costs of the offline, traditional art market, and has expanded the interest of collectors and investors. Art curation is a resource-intensive process that requires a team with curatorial expertise and a deep understanding of the art industry; it also requires a team with unique Web 3 and technical knowledge. Art and tech know-how are the building blocks for a solid competitive edge.

In 2022, two new heavyweight players entered the curated NFT art platforms field: Outland and LiveArt. Like some of the existing top platforms such as Artblocks, Outland and LiveArt are unique in their curatorial missions.

Brief analysis of the model

Art Blocks

Founded in November of 2020 by generative artist, Erick Calderon, Art Blocks is a platform focused on curating on-chain generative art works. Art Blocks did not receive much attention from the market during its initial launch. Following their introduction of two of the most iconic generative artists, Dmitri Cherniak and Tyler Hobbs, Art Blocks gradually established itself as the leading generative art NFT program, boosted by the rise of the trading platform OpenSea and the NFT boom it brought. Art Blocks' Chromie Squiggle, Ringers and Fidenza have all sparked a wave of investment in the NFT world of generative art.

Outland

The main objective of the Outland platform is to promote the continuous creation of high quality artists' work and to create a network of leading voices in the field of digital art, criticism and collecting. Dedicated to fostering critical dialogue around emerging digital technologies and their connection to contemporary art, the goal is to provide insightful perspectives and context on a future-oriented art world, in addition to providing support to talented artists in the creation of NFTs.

LiveArt

LiveArt is an art platform made up of art market insiders and technology innovators that combines innovative technology with in-depth knowledge of the art market to bring the art industry into the future.LiveArt sells both physical and digital art, and are experts in bringing both traditional and digital artists into Web3. LiveArt provides traditional and crypto artists with a comprehensive set of Web3 solutions for their projects. From creative support in their digital studio, and technology support to operations, strategy and marketing LiveArt is full-service Web3 platform for artists and brands. In addition, LiveArt also supports collectors, providing in real time AI-driven data tools to help them conduct detailed analysis of artists and market trends.

Summary

As can be seen, the three platforms have very different focuses：

Art Blocks specializes in the curation of on-chain generated art.
Outland focuses on art market education and discourse building, which is the essence of art curation, in addition to curating outstanding artists and their NFTs.
LiveArt provides both well-known and emerging digital and physical artists and brands with a customized full-service solution to create, market and distribute NFTs while also providing professional art investment analysis tools and a peer-to-peer trading market for traditional art collectors. It’s a clever business model consisting of free data tools that funnels both crypto and traditional collectors to the platform, where they are presented with a curated selection of top physical and digital artists. LiveArt brings the art world into Web3, establishing a community that embraces creators and collectors interested in the best curated selection of digital and physical art. Free tools to incentivize so that established.

Team

Art Blocks

Erick Calderon, founder of Art Blocks, was one of the first CryptoPunks users, holding upwards of 60 CryptoPunks. He is also one of the few Larva Labs-designated CryptoPunks moderators, and is well known in the crypto community for his rare attribute of the Zombie Punk avatar. He is also a generative artist.

Outland

Jason Li, founder of the platform, is a member of the Whitney Museum of American Art Artist Council, advising and supporting the museum in all aspects of its development, and is a veteran collector of contemporary art and NFT art.

Ms. Xue Mei, Artistic Director for Asia, has over 15 years of experience in the contemporary art industry. She was the CEO of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) and led the team to make UCCA run independently. Her experience as Director and General Manager of Education and Institutions at K11 Art Foundation has also given her a wealth of experience in cultural exchange and artist incubation.

LiveArt

The three co-founders of LiveArt all came from the world's top auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's and held core positions (including Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Business). Decades of cultivation in the art industry and accumulation of resources make LiveArt more adept at utilizing years of industry resources and elite teamwork to present artistic beauty and commercial value.

Summary

The skills and endowments of these talented teams are well combined：

The founder of Art Blocks was an early NFT adopter and has a strong influence in the NFT community. He is also very passionate about generative art, a form of art that works well with blockchain, which is why he founded Art Blocks and insists on curating the project with a more Web3 contextual artistic expression of on-chain generative art NFTs.
With museum and art education backgrounds, Outland's founders lean toward user education and discourse building, through which they have seen much success.
LiveArt's founders come from top auction houses therefore strengthening their ability to broker transactions and investor services, which is a perfect match for the current business model.
Echoed in the previous section, curation is not just about promoting or selling NFTs, but also about establishing the context and cultural connections behind the work.

Financing and participating institutions

Art Blocks

Art Blocks has received $6 million in financing. TRUE Ventures led the round, with participation from Galaxy Digital's VC Galaxy Interactive and Collab Currency, among others. Art Blocks' curated works have been recognized by investment institutions, and Curated, a $30 million NFT investment fund, can be seen in its online gallery, which already has a significant percentage of Art Blocks' generated art in its collection, including Chromie Squiggle and Fidenza. Zhu Su, former co-founder of renowned VC Three Arrows Capital, bought Art Blocks' NFT Ringers #879 for 1,800 ETH (worth about $5.8 million at the time).

Outland

Outland closed a $5 million seed round led by OKG Ventures with participation from IMO Ventures, Dragon Roark and JDAC Capital.

LiveArt

LiveArt closed over $4.6 million in funding led by Animoca Brands, Binance, KuCoin, with participation from Alameda Ventures, OKX BlockDream Capital, Gate Labs, HashKey, APENFT Foundation, SNZ, Shima Capital, ArkStream Capital, Head&Shoulder Financials, AppWorks and others.

Summary

All three of the top Web3 art curation incubators have received funding. LiveArt's funding has room to grow, but it has received investment from top Web3 investment institutions and exchanges. In the warm-up phase before the launch of their first master NFT, it was supported by the publicity of major top institutions. Combined with the project's token issuing expectations, we can sense that it is very different from other projects.

Genesis NFT Empowerment and Market Performance

Art Blocks

Chromie Squiggle is the first work of Art blocks, and holders of this NFT can participate in the governance of the Art Blocks platform. Although Chromie Squiggle is not very empowering, every time Art Blocks exceeds expectations for a successful curated project, the price of Squiggle rises.

Chromie Squiggle, with a total quantity of 10,000 and a mint price of 0.035 ETH, hovered at a low level for several months after its release until June 2021, when the floor price really broke through and started to rise significantly after the introduction of top artists to the platform gained significant market attention.The current floor price is 11 ETH and the pending order rate is only 2%. In September 2021, Chromie Squiggle #4697 sold for 945 ETH, the highest price ever paid for this work.

Outland

Outland's Genesis NFT project is Fang Lijun's Elemental, combining the familiar bald figures of the artist's paintings with representations of earth, water, fire and air. As one of today's most important contemporary artists, Fang Lijun's work is significant in the history of contemporary art in China and around the world. In the past, Fang Lijun's highest record was set this year with his Series II (No. 4), which sold for ￥63.83 million at China Guardian's Spring 2022 auction.

The project consists of 2,022 pieces of digital clay NFT blind boxes, and the holder can get the subsequent whitelist on the Outland platform. When the number of subsequent project releases is greater than 2022, users holding Fang Lijun Elemental can automatically get the whitelist. If the number of subsequent project releases is less than 2022, the whitelist will be issued by selecting users by means of extraction and other methods, and the mint price will be lower than other users, which makes Outland's Genesis NFT with an extremely strong golden shovel attribute.

Elemental's whitelist price was 0.2 ETH, the public sale price was 0.3 ETH, and the secondary market price stayed around 0.5 ETH for the most part. However, since the confirmation of the collaboration with artist James Jane and the auction of his work in March, the market sentiment was extremely high with the auction bids of over 70 ETH. With users predicting a floor price of 1.2 ETH for James Jane's new project release and the possibility of casting two James Janes with Elemental, the combination of sentiment and anticipation saw Elemental's floor price reach a staggering 7 ETH before the new project snapshot. Currently Elemental's floor price is back to 2.35 ETH, with a pending order of only 2%, and the floor price has remained relatively healthy enough to reflect the higher market consensus.

Elemental's floor price trend

LiveArt

While the Liveart platform has been curating and incubating NFTs, the first true masterpiece of creation is the recently launched Meta-morphic: Seven Treasures by Huang Yuxing. Generated by 3D design and encryption algorithms, each NFT is a gemstone or mineral floating in multidimensional space, with different forms and connotations.

Meta-morphic Mystery Box

Huang Yuxing is the most valuable post-70s Chinese artist, whose work "Seven Treasure Pines" was sold for HK$64.83 million at Christie's autumn auction in 2021, setting the highest auction record for a post-70s Chinese artist. With a turnover of over RMB 100 million, Huang Yuxing was among the top 3 artists in the Chinese art market in 2021. The waiting list for Huang Yuxing's new works is extensive, with many collectors standing by for as long as two years.

As the first heavyweight artist collaboration series NFT collection launched by LiveArt, Meta-morphic: Seven Treasures holders can enjoy diverse benefits, including but not limited to: series priority rights and benefits in other NFT series by Huang Yuxing in the future, as well as deep binding with LiveArt ecological rights and benefits to enjoy more perks. With these perks, the NFTs have also become the golden shovel of LiveArt platform.

Meta-morphic: Seven Treasures has received great market attention since the beginning of its launch, from the promotion by several top-tier institutions, to the cooperation of several top blue-chip communities, and the support of cultural entrepreneur Zheng Zhigang and top collector Sun Yuchen. Ultimately, the NFT pre-sale phase sold out in one minute at a price of 1.2 ETH.

Meta-morphic: Seven Treasures is divided into three chapters, while only the first chapter presale has taken place. It should be followed by the same utility mechanism as Outland, while ensuring the rights of the holder to expand the influence, to attract new holders.

In addition, Huang Yuxing's works are highly recognized in both the East and West, and the current project incorporates a number of Huang Yuxing's unpublished works and is not small in size, so it can be assumed that the value of the NFT base is bound to Huang Yuxing's physical works to a certain extent; Although the floor price is temporarily low due to the market environment, considering that there might be multiple rounds of airdrops including physical prints after the project, Meta-morphic is likely to gain more collectors' consensus and after the mystery box unveiling and utility mechanism clarified, just like Fang Lijun's Elemental and Chromie Squiggle.

Promotion methods and development analysis

Art Blocks

The founder of Art Blocks has continued to promote NFT-generated art offline, establishing an Art Blocks gallery in Texas and curating Chromie Squiggle at exhibitions in Miami, Manhattan, Chicago, and the ETHDenvor Conference. It is foreseeable that such curatorial activities will become more frequent, and the curatorial venues will gradually enter the big museums of the temple. The Art Block approach is traditional but effective, with frequent curation, media coverage, and public auctions, bringing in more institutional investors, art collectors, and traditional art collecting funds.

Outland

As mentioned above, the biggest difference between Outland and other curatorial/incubation platforms is that Outland chose to intervene in this track from art criticism and news gathering at its inception, and has been publishing analysis of many projects on its content platform since December 2021. After releasing NFTs, Outland still retains art criticism as its core business, and its official website contains reviews, collections, conversations, news and more resources. In this way, the founders hope to focus more attention on artists' biographies, creative contexts, and the exploration of their deeper values, thus leading to less speculative behavior in the NFT market that is quick to arbitrage away from the market.

LiveArt

LiveArt relies on providing analytics services and a mobile App to increase collectors' user stickiness, while providing a peer-to-peer art marketplace. Because of collectors' user stickiness and the project team's previous auction house experience, LiveArt's average order price can reach $100,000 and has thousands of certified art buyers and sellers. LiveArt has now reached the top 5% of global sales, such is its ability to capture value, and when it launched select curated NFTs, it also achieved notable sales results.

Summary

Art Blocks is different from Outland and LiveArt in that it is itself an art curation platform grown up in the context of Web3. So when it has achieved great success in its business on the blockchain, if Art Blocks wants to expand its audience, it must go through the process of offline curation and toward the auction house model, which is also the direction Art Blocks has been cultivating. Outland and LiveArt are both teams transforming from traditional art industry to Web3 that carry rich art industry resources and aura. Both cooperate with top artists and aim to migrate and integrate the experience, ability, users and resources of traditional fields to Web3.
LiveArt, Art Blocks and Outland differ greatly. Art Blocks and Outland currently only provide a distribution business, and royalties are their main sources of income, therefore their income and the crypto market cycle are closely linked, so the revenue structure has more fragile characteristics. LiveArt's business side is more diversified. In addition to NFTs, it also has a physical art e-commerce Web2 business, and the fast-growing revenue in this area ensures the project's continuous operation, which brings greater certainty to LiveArt and NFT holders.

Conclusion

Art blocks, Outland, and LiveArt are all top platforms in the Web3 art curation track, and these top platforms, relying on their own advantages and understanding of Web3, have made their own unique expressions on the narrative of curation. In the past NFT community research, we found that most NFT players are more optimistic about the future of art NFTs, have higher expectations for the diversified development of NFTs and show greater willingness to invest. In addition, investors are more sensitive to the secondary market floor price and are more susceptible to the emotional impact of secondary market fluctuations, rather than collecting more based on artistic attributes. Therefore, relying on the Web3 art curation platform, identifying outstanding works and placing bets based on its long-term experience and information advantage in the art industry may be a choice with a higher win rate for NFT art investors.

References

https://www.defidaonews.com/article/6733468 https://lwsnbaker.mirror.xyz/ftt7ojZG2q9txxCz1IRDEoSQGQ2CyY53gCJtsJ6uyA4 https://www.panewslab.com/zh/articledetails/rrxwjb94.html http://www.chinartlaw.com/index.php?r=post%2Fview&id=900&f=111 https://www.jinse.com/blockchain/1183566.html http://www.99ys.com/home/2022/06/28/21/214248.html https://www.techflowpost.com/article/1355

· 关于 SnapFingers DAO ·

Empowered by Assembly Partners

SnapFingers DAO 是一个专注于区块链前沿赛道研究的组织，致力于通过激励模型吸引来自不同领域的投研人士和社区贡献者，形成从研究到传播的影响力闭环，最终实现在区块链的世界里打个响指的目标愿景。

联系我们