Blockchain-based certificates of authenticity: secure storage and easy accessibility

Innowise has built a management system that allows artists or galleries to tokenize their artwork and issue blockchain-based certificates of authenticity, securely stored and accessible via QR codes.

Customer

Industry

Art

Region

Europe

Client since

2024

Our client is a professional asset manager with experience in the markets of France, the USA, and China. She has been providing expert consulting on blockchain projects since 2016. She is also a skilled calligraphy artist, continuing her family’s four-generation legacy in the art of Chinese ink painting.

Challenge

The client required a solution that would make art authenticity verification simple, transparent, and accessible

The art market is grappling with critical challenges surrounding the authentication of artworks, especially impacting artists. A significant issue is the lack of transparency in the provenance of artworks, which leads to artists’ creations being stolen or counterfeited. Artists often face difficulties in proving the authenticity and history of their work, making it harder to protect their reputation and receive fair compensation.

Traditional methods of creating and managing authenticity certificates can be complicated and time-consuming, resulting in increased administrative costs for artists and galleries. This inefficiency can discourage artists from seeking certification, reducing their ability to authenticate and protect their creations.

Our client brings a unique combination of skills: as a professional asset manager, she deeply understands financial risks and the complexities of international transactions, and as an artist continuing her family’s tradition, she knows how important it is to protect authorship and prevent others from stealing or exploiting someone else’s work. The client trusted Innowise to create a solution to make authenticity verification simple, transparent, and accessible.

Solution

A system for tokenizing artwork and issuing blockchain-backed certificates of authenticity accessible through QR codes

Innowise has built a solution to let artists and galleries create certificates of authenticity for artworks that will be securely stored on the blockchain after undergoing the tokenization process. Our goal was to simplify authentication and provide trust in digital and analog environments through modern blockchain and QR coding technologies.

We provided technical consultations to define the requirements for an art authenticity verification system, designed the UI/UX for artists and collectors, developed client and server apps for certificate management, and integrated ThirdWeb-audited smart contracts for secure provenance records.

Certificate generation

Users can upload photos and details of their artwork to the system and click the “Create” button to generate a certificate.

The certificate is then created and securely signed onto the blockchain.

An uploaded digital copy of the certificate holds essential significance as it is primed for subsequent processes, such as tokenization, which improves security, privacy, and data integrity.

Artworks tokenization

After generating the certificate, the system assigns a unique token to each artwork using standards like ERC-721 (for Ethereum), transforming every piece into a non-fungible token (NFT).

The token details, including ownership and transaction history, are also recorded on the blockchain and can be easily viewed through a blockchain explorer. This provides complete transparency and allows anyone to verify the authenticity and provenance of the artwork.

The certificate is also visible on OpenSea, one of the most popular NFT marketplaces. This visibility gives artists greater exposure to a global audience of collectors and buyers and simplifies authenticity verification — further increasing the artwork’s market potential and accessibility.

IPFS-backed certificate

We link an IPFS key to each certificate, which has brought significant benefits to our client. With IPFS, the certificate and artwork details are stored decentralized and securely, making them far less vulnerable to data loss or tampering. Even if centralized servers go down or get compromised, the data stays accessible and intact across the IPFS network.

This way, we add extra trust and reliability to the certificate, so its authenticity and permanence remain intact. It’s a smart way to future-proof and safeguard the artist’s work and its records.

Secure access to certificates

Users receive a QR code or link upon certificate release, which they can share to enable others to easily verify the artwork through a straightforward check on the website. This feature streamlines the verification process, strengthens security by restricting access to sensitive data, and provides a convenient way for owners to prove the authenticity of their artworks to potential buyers or collectors.

Technologies

Web app

React, NX, Inversify, RxJs, Apollo-Client, GraphQL, Thirdweb

Backend

NestJS, Typescript, NodeJS, AWS, Redis, Mongodb, GraphQL, Web3, BitPay, Jest, BitBucket, Docker, Bitbucket Pipelines, Nginx, Websockets, Thirdweb, Mongoose

Blockchain

Solidity, OpenZeppelin, HardHat, Ethers, Mocha, Chai, Thirdweb

Process

After gathering and documenting the client’s requirements, Innowise began the development process. Our team used the Scrum model with one-week sprints and tri-weekly meetings to address key issues. The project manager provided frequent and expert consulting throughout the process, providing the client with timely and proficient guidance on the project’s flow. The team managed tasks and project discussions through Slack and Jira. Each week, the project manager connected with the client on Google Meet to provide a development progress update.

Team

Project Manager

Business Analyst

UI/UX Designer

Web3 Developers

QA Developer

Results

Simplified art authentication

Thanks to blockchain technology, each artwork’s data can be tokenized, allowing artists and galleries — our client’s target audience — to easily prove authenticity, eliminate doubts about provenance, and reduce the risk of fraud.

Beyond art, this project could pave the way for blockchain-based verification models in other industries, such as luxury goods, collectibles, and even official documents. The platform’s core technologies — tokenization and secure blockchain storage — can be adapted to protect and verify a range of valuable assets. This scalability highlights the potential of blockchain not only to simplify art authentication but also to bring similar security and transparency benefits to other sectors.

Project duration

April 2024 - October 2024

Simplified art authentication

High solution scalability

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