Harold Eytan on Particle’s tokenized fine art platform

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the cryptocoin show of harold etan ceo of particle harold welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time today thanks for having me ashton pleasure to be here you're very welcome uh let's dive straight into it you and your team are working on some great innovations at

0:21particle and i feel like now in the cryptocurrency markets you know with a little bit of a bearish trend is like the best time to be heads down just working hard on these innovations and there's so many good companies that are building amazing products right now so let's just break right into it with starting the conversation on a little bit about the solutions that you and

0:41your team at particle are working on and then we'll dive into all things in the space sure yeah i mean so what we're kind of um what we're addressing at particle is uh is mainly the issue of access and opacity of the fine art market and the fine art experience generally how i've defined myself the fine art experience is really a four piece puzzle of you

1:09know the art itself of course uh knowledge and education around the arts um and you know a lot of people in in the final world they have masters in in in in the history of art et cetera you can do your own research as well um but really having that expert knowledge is is difficult to to to attain then there's access access to the art access to the advisors access to

1:35the um let's say the ins and out of the art market how things work for people who are trying to get into fine art collecting where do you start very difficult and the final piece um of the puzzle is really ownership um and that's kind of the the final piece that we're um that i believe is the kind of the the major value out of particle it's that there's this um

1:59there's this kind of uh concept that ownership enhances the enjoyment of art uh and it's almost a chemical reaction in your brain where if if you're in uh if if we're in a room together and we're looking at the same kind of work of art let's call it an andy warhol um we we may both appreciate it and and and uh and and you know appreciate its beauty etc and

2:22in its historical context etc however if you own that work of art you appreciate that much more and this little extra piece really makes a world of a difference and is what most the majority of people actually don't get to experience that whole holistic fine art experience of these four kind of puzzles and so you know in parallel to that fine art has well the whole experience has only

2:46been available to kind of a select few high net worth net worth people and and these masterpieces which were really created by humanities genius for the um the enjoyment of of the masses a lot of them are held in free ports warehouses around the world because they've been bought and transacted for purely financial reasons so what we're trying to do here is to open up this

3:11fine arts uh world to a greater audience and offer them all pieces to the puzzle now you know i say all this but what does it actually kind of um end up looking as a product is really particle what we do is we offer to our community um ownership and fine art masterpieces and we do that by putting a masterpiece like we did with um banksy's lovers in the air that we um

3:38tokenized if you want in uh early this year end of january and we put it through the particlization process essentially what it is is it digitally fractionalizes it into 10 000 unique nfts that represent specific plots of land on the painting these are then sold as as nfts and can be openly traded on the secondary market and that allows for everybody to have

4:04really a piece or multiple pieces of this painting and feel that ownership piece of the puzzle in parallel to that we of course offer um education and access to advisors and everything that's around all the whole experience around that painting and around the art world generally so you know what we're really doing is kind of establishing a new art curator or

4:28collector class and these particles what we call them these nfts essentially because they represent ownership in the yard they also allow you to govern the art itself what do we do with it where should we exhibit it should it be sold if there's an offer on it or not um should we explain should we loan it to a certain museum a certain gallery all these decisions are

4:53put up to the collector community very cool great intro harold and yeah you're right i don't know a lot about the traditional fine art industry but from what i understand it's like this wild garden that like you're either inside the club or or you're totally out of it and when you're moving to a new version of that and with adding digital it's hard to break apart the

5:18club that already exists unless there's benefits for them as well and you know democratizing access to these uh pieces of fine art i feel like is a great way for potentially for them to uh capitalize on the industry as well um have you heard any feedback from like traditional industry on you know this transition into moving fine art into web three and

5:44if they like it or is it similar to you know how the banks are afraid of crypto because it's sort of taking over their industry i think the the general attitude is is one of uh caution i would say you of course have certain parties that are more open to being innovative and uh see the benefits and that see that you can leverage your community to purchase

6:07these these works of art they would see this as a as as um another sales channel for them um but for sure it it you know while we this banksy that uh that that um that was sold to our community it's it's called the lovers in the air and it's the you must know it it's the protagonist that kind of throws a bouquet of flowers rather than a malt of cocktail and that kind of

6:32it's kind of how we're approaching um what we're doing it's we're not trying to destroy the status quo we're just trying to offer a kind of beautiful alternative to how things are happening right now and it's just this there's certain certain galleries certain museums that that do subscribe to to that and see see where we're going but for sure you know a lot feel threatened

6:55and also you know in the very the the very basics of this close-knit opaque fine art community is about exclusivity and and and and keeping the circle as small as possible and uh and so when when you're doing something that's trying to you know kind of break that then you you do get pushback but i think what what we're proving here is that you have just a massive comm and we're only

7:21scratching the surface barely scratching the surface of that put you know the the addressable audience for for for this kind of service but what you do see is that there's tons and tons of people that want to get involved uh can't because for financial reasons they don't have millions of dollars to spend but they would be the champions of the art and if you lev this is all what theory

7:43is about right is to leverage the community to um to kind of achieve more than what a small group of people would be able to do uh beforehand and i think that's what these web three tools allow us to do endows is really what it is is a way to organize humans to be able to work together more effectively and achieve that you know greater things than uh

8:06than what was previously possible with the limited tools we had for humans to kind of work together asynchronously great insight harold and now with that said about approaching with caution from the old world how does your team approach that problem at hand it must be a challenge to sort of build technology and either approach the artists or approach the museums and

8:31actually start this integration into you know web 3 art so so the question is how do we approach these uh the the these kind of traditional players yeah um we do it by trying to speak their language and trying to show um so there are certain kind of um certain steps uh i'm gonna say steps but there's a framework within which they

8:57operate and we try to frame our pitch if you want uh within that that kind of way of thinking that they have um you know they have commission structures they have certain clauses and their agreements when they sell to individual collectors um and you know we we try and see it's always um we don't have a once we don't have a like a single rigid solution for um

9:24for all these parties what we do is we just we negotiate and we figure out what is the best fit you have to speak to a gallerist different to speak to an artist differently than when you speak to a collector um so kind of we're right now we're in the process of fine-tuning that pitch and figuring out for each of these parties what is the best way to approach them and what

9:46actually makes them tick um that's kind of what we're how we're approaching it but it's you know it's not easy and it's definitely a work in progress and something that we're learning as these conversations are happening right i feel like the digitization and fractionalization of these fine art pieces is inevitable at what speed the industry moves into you know fully

10:11encompassing that i'm not sure but how quickly do you sort of see it happening you know we're seeing great artists like banksy starting to fractionalize and but there's not even a decimal of a percent of a fine art that's actually been tokenized and fractionalized um do you see it becoming the norm in in 10 years or you know how long-term vision are you and

10:34your team looking um look i i i don't think it's going to be the i i think that you know ultimately people are always going to want to have there's always going to be individuals who are going to want to have major masterpieces hanging in there in their living rooms right so i don't think we'll ever i don't think it's ever going to move completely to a fully

10:56decentralized ownership of all of uh of the world's kind of fine art um but definitely they are going to be as as as businesses like ours start to facilitate um the kind of communal ownership of these assets i think it's going to become more and more popular but the key here is to make sure that this doesn't only become a digital experience and that

11:21it's it's very easy for them for the yard to then just remain in a warehouse and just say well look you own a piece of it enjoy that piece and it's done that's why we're putting such an emphasis on the kind of real world events and i think that's what i've also found with the whole nft ecosystem is while it's all online and everybody you know everyone is remote etc you have

11:44all these nft conferences around the world that are just becoming bigger and bigger and bigger each time people want to meet in real life and that's why we host exhibits uh irl in in museums like we did at the ica in miami in december um and we did in uh galleries in new york and in l.a previously um and now we have a vote for a european city for the for the tour so the kind of

12:10the owners of these banks you get to devote on that but i think it's having this the the the putting the emphasis on the physical um and not losing sight that this is a physical work that that needs to be experienced really in its to experience it in its entirety you have to be in the presence of the other it does have a definitely uh uh it makes a big difference

12:34so um yeah i would say that the the physical is a kind of a very important part of it i completely agree and i feel like people that are they get deep into nfts and and cryptocurrencies and when they see something that's physical you know even like the physical bitcoins they get like this nostalgic feeling like oh something in real life that i can actually see and

12:53with fine art especially that's especially true um now i want to sort of flip the the switch to the other side to talk about uh the people that now are able to invest and own a piece of of these pieces of art through your technology how does that work for somebody who you know was interested in fine art but they weren't able to access it because of financial

13:16reasons as you mentioned and now they can go to your site and then they can see works of art that are just actively available or there's a drop and you know things like banksy they're announced and then they sell out right away now how does that work for somebody that wants to buy a piece of art yeah so we've only done this so far once with the banksy uh that was kind of the

13:36the the the test in the market which was uh which was successful and so how it works is a drop so we go out and we source um with our team of uh of of kind of art experts which includes uh luige who was the um who's one of the founders of particle and um and was the uh former co-chairman of um contemporary and post postwar and contemporary art at christie's so we

14:03source kind of these masterpieces pick one that we believe is is the right one to offer to the community and yeah structure it like a drop so it's particle eyes into in the case of the banksy ten thousand different pieces um and sold and sold as such basically so the next one um that we're looking to do is gonna happen probably around october because we're

14:25currently kind of revamping and rebuilding our platform to um enhance that experience uh both on the you know drop minting purchasing side but also on the marketplace side and on the whole experience of the digital ownership side um but yeah it'll happen it it'll happen in in around october and november with the second painting now the goal is to do that now i think it'll give us some

14:52time as well to to rebuild from this kind of lull in the market right and but the goal is to be able to have to build a platform where we can have a a very healthy cadence of art being uh offered to our community great to hear and i'm looking forward to that drop i will follow along for that um you go on particlecollection.com is our is our um is our website and uh yeah

15:19like i was saying you know really the the the goal from now until then until october november is really to build the experience that is going to uh allow us to onboard a lot of the non-crypto native people i think that's what a lot of people have realized is that you know while there's a lot of money in crypto and in nfts more specifically there's not actually that

15:37many active participants there's a lot of kind of hurdles to actually end up buying a a digital asset and so we need to make sure that we make this as user friendly and as accessible to people who are not crypto native which is our kind of uh potentially could be that well i i think is actually would for sure be the bigger part of our audience which right now

16:04heavily skews towards um crypto native and that you know brings me to the fact that we have a more crypto native audience right now group of owners it comes with different expectations for how um nft projects and we're categorized as an ft project but i don't think we are we're leveraging uh non-fungible technology but we're not really an nft digital art project but they expect

16:31they're different uh than when you're then then then what you should be expecting when you're dealing with fine art masterpieces um i think you know being able to cater and and and building something that caters better to such an audience a non-crypto native audience is is what makes sense for our project specifically yeah well said harold and i completely

16:51agree i feel like we're so early on with this uh that it's really the the tech nerds that have jumped on it first and uh eventually you know all when more fine art is is on web3 and tokenized it will be more of that original audience sort of hey checking this out with technology incorporated um so i'm looking forward to seeing how it all plays out and just how the nft

17:17market um you know you sort of mentioned there about in october um hopefully the the market's sort of shifting upwards um do you expect to see a revival and a growth of the nft industry uh bigger than you know what it has been at the beginning of this year sort of the biggest it's ever been um what's your trajectory for nfts in fine art and things that aren't really tech related

17:42uh in the coming two years or three years yeah i i i look i i think that up the the massive boom in uh in nft's you know the the the past year has really been um i mean it was it was triggered i think by um you know people and his and his massive sale but really it was carried and really propulsed by the pfp projects um and then you have so

18:11many of those that nft is synonymous with a pfp project right now and to the detriment of one of one digital artists and you know the pacs the people's yes they're doing they're doing absolutely fine but the eyeballs are all on these pfp projects that offer more and more utility more and more financial utility i mean i think if you bought a an ape at

18:32mint you probably you got something like 86 additional value from the airdrops that they gave you but not everyone is able to uh sustain that kind of model a very few are i think a lot of projects now have crashed a lot probably are gone forever um and so i think that the next wave is really going to be hopefully we're going to move away from this nft equals pfp

18:59nft is a technology that can be used for you know just basically pretty much anything really uh and uh and and and my hopes is that we're going to see something that's a little more stable and that's going to it's going to be to the benefit of projects such as ours great insight harold and for the viewers that want to check out the community and so follow along to get

19:24notice of the next drop and just the updates for particle what's the best way to stay involved yeah on particlecollection.com is uh is is where uh is our site on twitter collect at collectparticle and uh and then we have our dao twitter which is um article dao xyz on uh on twitter as well um and just to touch on that how um how the how we facilitate the

19:52governance of all these paintings is essentially that each painting is its own kind of sub dao um so you can if you go to the the particle.xyz twitter you'll be able to get access to our discourse and you'll see kind of the conversations that are happening around uh banksy's love is in the air and um and kind of the governance processes that are being put in place by the

20:14community and and how it's it's developing and it's only very fresh right uh and a lot we need to be fleshed out um but you know it's the beginning of something that i think is really exciting and really revolutionary honestly very cool i will leave those links in the description box below to make it easy for the viewers as well thank you for the insights harold all the best on

20:34everything particle moving forward and let's follow up in the near future sounds good thank you you