WISeKey International Holding Ltd (NASDAQ:WKEY, SIX: WIHN))), a leading cybersecurity, IoT, and AI platform company, today announced that is has joined forces with Ocean Protocol (“Ocean”), the leader in decentralized data marketplaces whose team also built the world’s first blockchain-secured art platform.
WISeKey and Ocean are working together to launch WISeART, a decentralized marketplace for physical paintings, sculptures, and more. The marketplace will include non-fungible tokens (“NFTs) to represent the physical work, combined with fungible tokens for more fluid price discovery, and enable staking on physical artworks.
The marketplace combines the strengths of WISeKey and Ocean. WISeKey has developed specialized chips to link physical items with NFTs, and world-class blockchain identity technology. Ocean has developed powerful decentralized marketplace technology, battle-hardened in the domain of data. Combined with WISeKey’s NFTs, this marketplace technology readily ports to the domain of physical art and offers other benefits given the Ocean team’s pioneering experience in blockchain art platforms.
Purchasing an exclusive piece of art is always a matter of great joy, but this purchase comes with the concern that the work may be stolen, the art itself may not be an original, or its provenance might not be verifiable. While most high-end art collectors find it difficult to stop such acts, WISeKey’s WISeART technology takes steps to protect exclusive pieces of artwork. It combines cutting-edge authentication microprocessors with identity blockchain technology, which together with on-the-ground measures can ensure the authenticity of the artwork (see video https://youtu.be/oNvhMvdchGk). Moreover, if the art is stolen, it can be traced, making it difficult to be traded on the secondary market. This control is possible to practice because each artwork’s identity is stored on an immutable ledger (blockchain) in the implemented system.