Artory is a technology company working to provide the art market with a blockchain-secured registry of artworks. The Artory Registry contains millions of artworks and historical transaction records – aggregated using transaction and registration history and provenance – that is free for anyone to access.
The company was founded by Nanne Dekking and launched late in 2019. Prior to founding Artory, Dekking was Sotheby’s vice chairman and worldwide head of private sales, and vice president of Wildenstein & Co., one of the world’s leading art dealers. He is also currently the chairman of The European Fine Art Fair’s (TEFAF) Board of Trustees.
Artory secured $7.3m in a Series A funding last year, with investors including Hasso Plattner Ventures and 2020 Ventures – an early investor in 1stdibs and Spotify – according to Crunchbase.
Collectors and institutions can use the Artory platform to register works in their collection onto the blockchain. To facilitate the registration process, Artory teams up with third-party partners such as auction houses, galleries, and appraisal firms – like Gurr Johns or Winston Art Group – to verify a work’s provenance and ownership.
Once the piece is verified, the owner receives a blockchain-secured certificate of registration that is stored on Artory’s end-to-end encrypted platform. The owner’s identity is never known to Artory or to the public.
“We see Artory as a utility for the market,” Andrea Danese, co-founder of Artem Advisors LLC and senior advisor to Artory, told Private Art Investor. “Artory is something that can facilitate transactions and be a repository of information in a neutral, secure, and encrypted environment.”
Danese brings decades of finance and art market experience to the Artory team. Most recently, he co-founded and served as President & CEO of Athena Art Finance Corp. He was just joined in advising Artory by two of his former Athena colleagues, David Lister and Giuseppe Trimarchi.
The company was not coming up with a “revolutionary idea”, said Danese. “This is the application of a very basic principle to the art market, one you see in many other asset classes,” he said.
Artory partnered with Art Basel and UBS to produce The Art Market Report 2020, authored by Dr Clare McAndrew.
It provided analyses of art market performance sorted by region, artist, movement, time and price bracket. Additionally, it enables users to see if certain data has been signed-off on by third-party experts.
Dekking said, “It is an honour to act as an asset for this report. Claire’s work represents a gold standard within the industry and the report has really become an invaluable resource for all parties involved in the market.”
Artory sourced major sales figures from first- and second-tier auction houses, as well as online auction houses across the globe, for the report. McAndrew said: “Even though the results of many auction sales are in the public domain, aggregating data is challenging, with some auction houses publishing limited results, selective ones or no results at all.”
Danese answered six questions about Artory which you can find here:
