Sotheby’s Metaverse Gets an Upgrade – ARTnews.com

Courtesy of Sotheby’s

Sotheby’s Metaverse, the auction house’s NFT marketplace, is getting an upgrade. The marketplace will now be expanded to include not only primary market offers, but also secondary sales, where collectors can sell directly to each other.

“The first phase of our launch has proven that both our traditional and digitally native collectors can coalesce around Sotheby’s to form a new community,” said Sebastian Fahey, Head of Sotheby’s Metaverse, in a press release. “Now, we continue to advance and develop our platform to provide new and more seamless ways for the community to discover and collect new forms of digital collectibles.”

The auction house is rejigging Metaverse so that the platform operates entirely on-chain, enabling peer-to-peer transactions on both Ethereum and Polygon. Still, it will work quite differently than secondary NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, where any user can upload whatever NFTs they want.

In the initial phases of the new Metaverse, collectors will only be able to list works from 13 artists: Tyler Hobbs, Claire Silver, XCOPY, Diana Sinclair, IX Shells, Sarah Zucker, Refik Anadol, Sofia Crespo, Sam Spratt, Pindar van Arman, Osinachi, Hackatao and Sebastião Salgado. It’s a strategy that will allow Metaverse to circumvent some of the problems that other secondary platforms faced.

OpenSea was constantly inundated with plagiarized, low-quality, or stolen NFT projects that left collectors feeling burned not only by scammers, but by a marketplace that could offer little in the way of compensation for lost investments. By limiting the works that collectors can list, Metaverse will be better able to avoid dealing with bad actors while keeping the quality of the works on offer high.

Metaverse has also committed to enforcing artist royalties that used to be part of NFT sales but have become optional in all other major NFT marketplaces as the market took a downturn.

The auction house first launched Metaverse in the fall of 2021. The site hosted its first auction soon after with its second-ever “Natively Digital” sale (titled “Natively Digital 1.2”). Debuting in a still hot market, the auction realized a crushing $18.6 million in sales with works by generative artists Dmitri Cherniak and IX Shells as well as NFT profile pictures like Bored Ape Yacht Club.

However, since that debut, Metaverse has only hosted sales of individual NFT collections, such as a series of NFT images by Sebastião Salgado that were sold for fundraising purposes or Erick Calderon’s Chromie Squiggles NFT project. Sotheby’s recurring “Natively Digital” sales, such as the recent “Glitch: Beyond Binary,” were hosted on Sotheby’s main online bidding platform instead of Metaverse, as expected when the marketplace launched. It is unclear why.