Digital asset-focused Swiss Bank, Sygnum, Sygnum, a Swiss bank, has partnered with Artemundi. Artemundi is an art investment company. Additionally, together they will provide fractionalized ownership shares in a Pablo Picasso artwork for $6,000 apiece.
Fillette au béret
The $3.68 million shares of Picasso painting “Fillette au béret” will be tokenized and issued via blockchain technology. Therefore, allowing a wide range of stakeholders to gain exposure to the artwork.
Sygnum Bank will sell the nonfungible tokens (NFTs) only to sophisticated and institutional investors, with secondary trading occurring on SygnEx, the digital asset trading platform of the bank.
Trade using Sygnum’s native Stable Coin
Using Sygnum’s native CHF stablecoin, DCHF, traders will resolve in Swiss Francs (CHF). Swiss law will recognize fractionalized ownership rights to the artwork.
The artwork, which portrays a beret-capped child dressed in vividly coloured clothes, was sold for $2.48 million in 2016.
Co-owner of Artemundi Speaks
Javier Lumbreras, a co-owner of Artemundi, underlined the revolutionary value of fractionalized ownership through NFTs, saying:
“Artistic, cultural objects of universal appeal, once reserved for an elite group of collectors or the museums, can now be safely and directly owned without the burden of high entry barriers.”
He further remarked about how the art market is absurdly opaque and inefficient but at the same time acknowledged that these characteristics would soon be relics of a bygone era.
Picasso on the blockchain
However, Sygnum isn’t the first company to attempt to tokenize Picasso’s oeuvre.
Sotheby’s announced in June that it had partnered with Mira Imaging to auction Picasso’s painting “Le peintre et son modèle” with an Ethereum-based nonfungible token generated by scanning “every micron” of the painting’s surface to establish a “unique encrypted signature” representing the masterpiece.
A Looking Glass scanner will scan the NFT to establish its validity. Sotheby’s, on the other hand, cancelled the NFT offering, and the picture sold for $3.12 million without a nonfungible equivalent.
