BPI-labelled Artprice Announces its Blockchain Project for the Art Market

PARIS, May 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Artprice obtained "innovative company" investment status from France's State-run Public Investment Bank (BPI) in November 2015. This prized status makes Artprice's capital accessible to Innovation Funds (FCPIs in France) for a 3-year renewable period. In addition to their potential returns, these funds enjoy certain tax advantages for investors.

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The BPI's Innovative Company status is a highly selective State label with strict admission criteria.

The Public Investment Bank (BPI) was set up to accelerate the development of innovative companies. The label is awarded only after a detailed examination of candidate companies which must prove they have created products, processes or techniques that have undisputed innovative economic potential.

With its industrial processes Artprice can allow itself the luxury of channelling 80% of its proprietary R&D budget into its various departments and, primarily, its IT department. 

In addition to substantial fiscal advantages, this R&D investment ensures that Artprice can regularly create new products and services that expand the Internet's commercial attractiveness, without any loss or capital increase diluting shareholder value or weighing on the growth of its share price.

According to thierry Ehrmann, Artprice's founder at CEO, "few listed companies can boast such salutory management and economic results… and in the coming years we will enjoy significant tax credits."

Artprice's R&D investment has allowed the company to build the world's most exhaustive Art Market databanks, notably in terms of the number of artists, the number of linked auction operators and the number of traced and historicised artworks.

In a world where tax obligations, transparency and regulatory compliance govern all high value-added markets, the Art Market can only be effectively regulated once standardised. Artprice is not only world leader in Art Market information, but also the leading pioneer of the market's standardisation.

For many years now, Artprice has collaborated with all the major players on the global Art Market including Interpol, more than 70 legal and customs authorities in different countries around the world and over 4,500 auction operators, most of which are directly linked to Artprice's secure global Intranet.

As announced very recently on Twitter, Artprice has jumped way ahead of the game by developing its own proprietary Art Market Blockchain, protected under intellectual property law. In fact, Artprice has built a distributed database containing specifications of years of complaints and lawsuits between the different segments of the Art Market chain and, notably, their relations with tax authorities and State judicial and customs services.

Artprice can therefore assure shareholder that it is more than ever protected from competition (whatever their means) by an insurmontable financial barrier-to-entry. This deliberate management strategy is a priority for Artprice and its shareholders. It guarantees that Artprice is always one step ahead of the game.

Artprice's Blockchain will be compatible avec IPv6 (network protocole without connexion of layer 3 of the OSI - Open Systems Interconnection) and IPv4.

Blockchain represents the most interesting technological development of the last fifiteen years. For a simple and rapid understanding of what Blockchain is about:

EN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_chain_(database)

Blockchain is a data storage and transmission technology that is transparent, secure and functions without any centralised control agency.

In short, a Blockchain is a databank containing the history of all exchanges between users since its creation. The databank is secure and distributed. It is shared by its different users without any intermediary, allowing each user to check the validity of the chain. Internet databank technology has been the core savoir-faire of Artprice and its parent company, Groupe Serveur, for 31 years.

In addition, Artprice has made a substantial investment in acquiring the Swiss company Xylogic whose technical team developed the e-SA3 (e-Solutions for Art and Auction). Xylogic's client base includes a large number of the world's major Art Market players and its e-Solution has a major and unique technological lead on the Art Market, primarily via its powerful proprietary algorithms. According to thierry Ehrmann, "with blockchain, the code is law."

Artprice is confident of the success of the Blockchain it has developed because it is the result of a consensus linking proof of work with proof of participation.

In the longer term the Blockchain will allow a considerable improvement in the payment of reproduction rights and other related rights to recognised copyright companies like the ADAGP in France which collects copyright duties in 43 countries.

Artprice's Blockchain will reduce transaction costs (intermediation) both for auctioneers and for galleries and museums. In fact, Artprice's Blockchain will take the place (among others) of catalogues raisonnés, which are subject to known defaults, weaknesses and 'subjectivity'. It will therefore become a sort of universal catalogue raisonné.

This Blockchain - owned by Artprice within an open system - will allow the total control of data, the management of copyright payments, the traceability of artworks, the tracking of stolen or lost artworks, their tracking by custome authorities and the localisation of artworks at any given moment.

Ever-conscious of their reputational risk, free ports, such as those in Geneva, should welcome the Blockchain as it will provide the durable credibility they need after the different scandals that have impaired their image.

Artprice will progressively install its Blockchain throughout its IT systems interacting with the global Art Market, and this will fluidify and authenticate transactions, giving collectors and art buyers of all kinds the confidence required to make the Art Market transparent. It will also assure buyers and sellers that their data will be freely duplicated, via Artprice's Blockchain, to millions of servers worldwide, and therefore unfalsifiable.

With its Blockchain, Artprice is making a significant contribution to the art market by enhancing its overall transparency vis-à-vis legislators and State authorities. This 'self-regulatory' inititiative represents a way of avoiding a surcharge of legislative and administrative constraints, which is why so many players on the Art Market are more than happy to contribute to the project.

In fact, 90% of the major global banks are working together on Blockchain solutions whose firepower and certification are infinitely superior to the current banking network (Swap, Clearstream, Euroclear ...).

Although this development may appear complex, it foreshadows the veritable digital revolution of value-added data streams that top-level financiers and bankers, as well as Stateman all over the world, already consider as irrevocable.

By its very nature, the Art Market is the perfect market for a Blockchain and Artprice is leading in the right direction as all its players are looking for the serenity and confidence that an absolutely safe market provides. According to all the major market research studies, the Art Market is becoming an efficient market like the financial markets.

Negative interest rates have increased the attractiveness of investing in the Art Market. 

We must not forget that one of the biggest challenges of this century is the negative interest rates practiced by central banks. These rates seriously undermine all forms of cash savings, hence the explosion of the Art Market in which Artprice has shown, with data on millions of transactions, that the yield on an artwork costing €20,000 is 9% p.a. and a work costing €100,000 provides a perpetual annual return of 12 to 15%. In volume terms, the Art Market has grown by 1,200% since 2000.

The Artprice Blockchain can be likened to a large public accounting book, both unfalsifiable and anonymous. To quote the mathematician Jean-Paul Delahaye, imagine a huge book that everyone can read and write into freely, but that is impossible to erase and and is indestructible.

Artprice - with the billions of logs each year onto its Big Data banks - knows the IT structure of the global art market and its algorithms better than anyone.

The new version of Artprice's Standardised Marketplace, deployed late April 2016, is entirely written to fit into Artprice's Blockchain, a guarantee of confidence, especially for the US market, Artprice's priority target.

Remarks, suggestions, advice and criticism from Artprice's clients and market professionals have contributed to the specifications of our Blockchain, which, by responding to a genuine and confirmed market need, has to be better than a solution imposed from the top.

About Artprice: 

Artprice is listed on the Eurolist by Euronext Paris, SRD long only and Euroclear: 7478 - Bloomberg: PRC - Reuters: ARTF.

Artprice is the global leader in art price and art index databanks. It has over 30 million indices and auction results covering more than 620,000 artists. Artprice Images(R) gives unlimited access to the largest Art Market resource in the world: a library of 118 million images or prints of artworks from the year 1700 to the present day, along with comments by Artprice's art historians.

Artprice permanently enriches its databanks with information from 4,500 auctioneers and it publishes a constant flow of art market trends for the world's principal news agencies and approximately 7,200 international press publications. For its 4,500 000 members, Artprice gives access to the world's leading Standardised Marketplace for buying and selling art.

Discover the Alchemy and the universe of Artprice http://web.artprice.com/video, which headquarters are the famous Museum of Contemporary Art, the Abode of Chaos http://goo.gl/zJssd https://vimeo.com/124643720

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The 2015 Art Market Report contains the famous Artprice ranking of the world's 500 most sought-after artists, the top 100 auction results, market breakdowns by country and by city, by period and by medium, Artprice indices and 21 chapters that provide an uncompromising analysis of the Art Market. It is available free of charge in PDF format at http://imgpublic.artprice.com/pdf/rama2016_en.pdf

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Contact : Josette Mey : e-mail : [email protected]

SOURCE Artprice.com