Deloitte Demos Blockchain Use Case for Art Industry

The use of blockchain data to establish provenance for artwork has attracted the attention of more than a few innovators and engineers in the space. Now, professional services firm Deloitte has unveiled its own approach to the use case.

The art world has explored the use of bitcoin and other blockchains to track provenance for some time, and the concept has drawn attention of digital creatives as well. Ultimately, the goal is to both ensure authenticity of an artwork and trace the history of ownership and use of that work.

Deloitte’s proof-of-concept, dubbed ‘ArtTracktive’, was developed by its Luxemourg office, and according to the firm, it seeks to provide a channel for distributed information sharing between artists, owners, galleries and anyone involved in the transportation of an artwork.

Patrick Laurent, a technology leader and partner for Deloitte, said in a statement:

"The blockchain distributed ledger can trace the journey of artworks. When this technology is used in the art market, all events in the life cycle of an artwork are recorded and traceable. The application addresses one of the main concerns in the art market today, namely the fragile documentation related to the provenance and movements of a piece of art."

The proof-of-concept was unveiled at the ICT Spring conference in Luxembourg, and comes amid a larger drive by the company to make public its efforts to develop the technology for business use.

In line with this, Deloitte recently unveiled a range of experiments using the technology during CoinDesk's Consensus 2016 blockchain conference in New York. At the time, it also revealed partnerships with industry startups BlockCypher, Bloq, ConsenSys Enterprise, Loyyal and Stellar.

Image via Shutterstock

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