The Sotheby Auction House Prepares To Launch The NFT Market

Sotheby's auction house in London. (Photo; Doc. Sothebys)

JAKARTA - Sotheby's, the world's famous art auction house, has gone further in the world of digital art by launching its secondary NFT marketplace. On May 1, the company announced the addition to the Sotheby's Metaverse in the form of "dynamic destinations to collect, buy and sell incredible digital works."

Blockchain-based NFT markets will mainly be for digital art secondary sales. According to the announcement, the market will feature a rotating selection of leading artists selected directly by Sotheby's specialists.

They will provide "expert guidance and context for each work, from thematic presentations to the artist's spotlight, for easy-to-navigate experiences designed for discovery."

Sotheby's is expanding its Metaverse platform to handle resales. This supports NFTs forged on Ethereum's scaling network and Polygon's layer-2.

Smart contracts will automatically set up secondary sales processes, allowing buyers and sellers to send and receive payments in Polygon's original ETH or tokens, MATIC. Information only, Smart contracts or smart contracts are computer programs written to perform agreements between two or more parties automatically.

This program is related to blockchain, so that when all the requirements have been met, the contract will be fulfilled automatically and transactions will be carried out. Smart contracts eliminate the need for third parties in the contract process, thereby accelerating and reducing costs in the transaction approval process.

The Sotheby's metaverse platform is supported by Mojito, an NFT trading suite developed by Serotonin, Web3 business studio. Sotheby's joined the 20 million US dollars investment round for Mojito in November 2021.

The NFT market has experienced a decline this year, with trading volume and prices slumping. However, this is an important step for the development of NFT trading in the future for the auction house Sotheby's in its evolution in Web3 space.