- IOTA developer Daniel D. Barber has introduced a new way of using the IOTA tangle in the art market.
- Important information about paintings and other valuable relics are stored on the tangle in a tamper-proof manner.
- In practice, buyers can retrieve reliable information on the respective objects simply by scanning a QR code and verify the authenticity.
The IOTA tangle offers many use cases, ranging from highly complex industrial processes to simple data generation and processing. IOTA developer Daniel D. Barber has presented in a new article how the tangle can be used to help artists verify the authenticity of their products and also continue to benefit from future sales.
Historical consensus on the IOTA tangle
In a research paper published last year, he presented a solution for product verification that would use 2-factor authentication. By verifying the future buyer and the producer of the painting, the authenticity of the product should be confirmed. However, this process is cumbersome and fails due to the fact that there is nothing immutable that connects the artwork to the tangle.
Therefore, Barber developed a process which he calls “Entanglement”. The aim is to establish a historical consensus about the origin of a work of art. In the process, a lot of information is stored on the tangle, representing an amount of data that will eventually be too large for hackers to manipulate.
A comprehensive register is to be created that contains information from various sources such as an online database that contains information about artists, art values and collectors. Transactions in the tangle should be accepted and entries by artists should be possible. The data used here can be made available for smartphone apps.
Users and potential buyers could obtain further information by simply scanning a QR code and thereby verify the authenticity of a product. According to Barber, the origin and authenticity of expensive art products should be legitimized by the historical consensus:
The Bundle Addresses maintained in the registry provide an immutable trail from artist to all of their artworks and from those pieces of artwork to their collectors. The legitimacy of the other artworks within the artist profile lend legitimacy to the entry for the questioned artwork, and with each transaction, new artworks, sales, location changes, etc, the legitimacy of both the artist and the artwork is strengthened. I call this ‘entanglement’.
Hackers could take the time to falsify the available information, but according to Barber it is unlikely that a fraudster would manipulate the complete history of a work of art, transactions, comments, sensor data and other stored data. The great advantage of IOTA over blockchain projects already on the market, such as VeChain, is that IOTA is resistant to quantum computers, which will increasingly come onto the market in the coming years.
Artists could also benefit financially from reselling their objects. Users of the application could agree to pass on a small percentage of the sales price to the producer in the form of MIOTA tokens. By using smart contracts and a registration application, the artist can profit proportionally if the value of the artwork increases. This is only a small part of the possible applications in practice.
In 2018, the art market was estimated at a volume of over $67 billion in 2018, an increase of more than $3 billion compared to the previous year.
IOTA follows current market trend
In the last 12 hours the price of MIOTA has fallen by 6.15% to $0.1359. With a market capitalization of almost $375 million, IOTA continues to rank 24th among the largest cryptocurrencies worldwide.
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