Monthly stats, improved sharing URLs, better artist tools and looking ahead to the future

May stats

• Sales — $36,000+ (170+ ETH) 💸
• Top 5 sales are all VR based works🥇
• Top sale of Spaced Painter & CryptoSpectr collab — a thrilling immersive VR work bought for 15.00 ETH($3210.90) by Museum of Crypto Art
• 370+ editions created ⏫
• 333 artists now onboard — over 35 added in May

An interest point to note is that the top 5 sales this month are all from immersive VR based artworks. We have always believed in the power of these spectacular and immersive pieces and this month we saw a massive signal in the same direction, well done to all those involved 👏!

This month we also saw our next Guest Editor, Jason Bailey, curating another selection of artworks. As we prep the next one if you would like to be part of this please do reach out, we’re always looking for new and exciting curators.

Finally, a quick update on total sales volumes — sales since KO inceptions this now stands at over 1359 ETH — tipping over $320,000 at the current price of ETH 😵.

For us these numbers still seem surreal 🤯, we hope that in this time we’ve helped many artists to monetise their amazing digital creations and that there is plenty more of this in the future. In general I still believe the space is fairly small and needs to grow much more, and the next 12 months we should see explosive growth in the whole NFT and digital arts scene as a whole.

So best belt up and prepare for the ride! 🚀

Feature updates

Secondary market discovery

We started of the month with the newly developed secondary market and spent the first part of May fixing bugs, adding features and a few extra tweaks such as enabling the current Gallery to filter on secondary and primary editions and making it easier to make an offer on any primary sold work.

These are only small and simple changes to hopefully enable easier discovery and provide better tooling for the sale on the secondary market.

In the meantime, we are working in stealth on a fresh discovery solution which will hopefully make finding and discovering artworks much better.

🔥Burn baby burn🔥

We also redesigned and enhanced the management tools for artists which now covers changing prices, gifting and transferring tokens, burning and reducing the supply of editions.

Burning is split into options — “complete burn” for editions with no sales, and “squash and burn” for partially sold editions. Squash only burns the remaining unsold supply.

As KO supports multiple editions we need to be careful about how burning any artworks is handled, we cant burn editions which have part sold as tokens have already been issued. Along with this it could incorrectly report stats about supply and rarity which we isn’t being fair on collectors.

All in all, this was previously a real pain point for artists, hopefully this closes the gap and gives more freedom and power to creatives on the platform.

One interesting feature which this could now enable, is that an artists can mint larger editions and then at a certain point of time burn the unsold supply in order to increase the scarcity, making those tokens already sold even more “rare” — maybe some artists may use this is a promotional and marketing tool.

As a side note, we have been asked by a few artists to add a feature which allows them to select the quantity to burn — this has been added to list and will be actioned at some point in the future.

User Collections

Since the start of this year we embarked on merging the concept of “artist” and “collector” profiles into a single place, this month we finally introduced what we have termed “collections” which is the last piece of the puzzle.

There is now no such thing as an artist page and a collect page — just a single place which houses all functionality, showing you the tools which you need. (Don’t worry, any old links still work, they are redirected to the new page)

All artist tools have been placed under a “Artworks” tab and sitting alongside a users “Collection” and any “Offers”.

Better profile URLs 🔗

Along with the profile changes we have introduced better profile URLs for all accounts on the platform.

Your username will now generate you a sharable link to your KO collection, for example to give you a flavour check out some links below

• knownorigin.io/lucidhouse
• knownorigin.io/civit
• knownorigin.io/mattia-cuttini
• knownorigin.io/cristofiam
• knownorigin.io/an0nym0us-nobody
• knownorigin.io/alotta-money

This has been a long requested feature so hopefully everyone likes it and enjoys better URL sharing with their followers on twitter and other platforms. So please update your social profiles to point to your KO profile URL!

That concludes an overview of the updates we have built and released in May.

Please do let us know what you think of the changes, it will help us understand where to focus our efforts ❤️

Looking ahead to a brighter future

In times of uncertainty the creativity train does not stop or sleep for anyone. Creators just want to create and many of them do regardless of their current situation. However, wider events taking place in the world will no doubt have an impact on our lives. 2020 so far has seen a spate of traumatic and unwanted events around the world.

Starting off the year we saw the Australian bush fires which decimated huge amounts of land and wildlife. A direct consequences of Global warming maybe, either way a shocking loss of habitat and life.

Then COVID-19 has and is killing thousands of people, bringing emotional and financial pain to many millions of us. A virus which does not discriminate meaning and has impacted many of us severely.

Now we are seeing huge unrest and uproar at the racial inequality and police brutality throughout the United States. With demonstrations happening worldwide as society tries to bring this plight to the forefront and stamp it out once and for all.

These events have deeply impacted our team, some directly. We struggle to know what to do to help, feeling powerless in most situations.

On a brighter note, the solidifying and emergence of a digital and remote economy which has bloomed from all this will drive the space forward no doubt. Hopefully opening new doors to previously unknown and emerging digital artists which can now promote and monetise their creations on sites like KnownOrigin.

Society as a whole looks to be taking action on world events and injustices going on, a promising sign that the status-quo will change and the needle is moved in the right direction.

We all hope the world settles down in the second half of the year and prosperity returns to many of those inadvertently impacted from what is going on.

Thanks for listening to my short musings and thoughts on the current situation, sometimes the only thing you can do it write down how you feel.

Thanks for reading!

Come join the telegram group and chat with other collectors and artists alike or follow us on twitter @KnownOrigin_io for more updates and collaborations.

Big love, stay safe, KO ☮️

KnownOrigin update — June 3rd 2020 was originally published in KnownOrigin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Before covering the updates we have started rolling out in the last few days, it’s worth cover some of the monthly key statistics from April along with various interesting tidbits.

April stats

• Primary sales — $38,000+ (213+ ETH) 💸
• Top sale — The Bull by Trevor Jones — $10,780 (55.55 ETH) 🥇
• 470+ editions created ⏫
• 610+ artworks sold 📈
• KO Second birthday and CV gallery opening 🍰
• Over 1000 ETH traded on KO since it’s inception! 😊

It’s been another eventful month for the community with some killer artwork and top sales figures, smashing all previous records on KO. I want to thank all collectors and artists who have supported KO’s continued growth in this nascent industry 🙏

As the onslaught of COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc socially, economically and emotionally around the world. Thankfully, a virus can not stop creativity and digital artwork continues to be created, viewed, and purchased.

March and April have seen big downturns in the traditional markets, countries around the world scrambling to work out what to do, yet we have seen no significant change in the number of new artworks being created in these same months. Not only this we have seen our best month ever in primary sales as well as footfall on the marketplace.

My point being that in times of reduced physical interaction the need and desire for a more focused digital world grows daily. Wether you think the social distancing measures introduced around the work are overblown or rightly enforced, there is no doubt in my mind that we are seeing a move further towards or internet first and digital first age. This can only fuel the continued growth of CryptoArt.

Now on the some cool new features!

Secondary sales & Artist royalties

KO is now 2 years old, and today we tentatively release the first iteration of our secondary sales offering. This includes paying royalties back to the original creatives behind each and every amazing piece of artwork listed on the site.

This feature has been requested and championed from the community in the last few months and we are now proud to be finally be supporting it.

We now have the technology which provides us transparency of transactions. It also enables, with smart contract code, an automatic royalty to be applied to all secondary sales. This technology is the key to achieving what has before been difficult, error-prone, and unwieldy. source; blackbox.art

KnownOrigin will now allow anyone to make to an offer on any artwork, inline with industry and community standards we will be allocating 10% of all secondary sales back to the original creator(s), this includes collabs which are split based on the original percentages specified at creation. This should hopefully further align further our small and fledgling industry onto the same path that everyone is willing and striving towards.

I think there is a fine line between encouraging collectors to use KO, which will apply these new rules, verse pushing collectors to sell artworks on other sites or using OTC trades to avoid the 10% patronage.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to enforce this universally across all platforms (yet), as we’ve written about before, but I am sure in the coming months and years new standards will emerge that can facilitate this, in the meantime we will be enforcing this when all items are resold directly on KnownOrigin.

We will be watching closely to see what happens on the secondary market in the coming weeks and months and will be reacting to feedback as it comes in.

How it works?

Every tokenised artwork now allows new prospective collectors to make an offer.

The potential new buyer can enter the amount they want to offer, sending to the money to be escrowed in the new smart contract. The current owner of the token can then accept and or reject the offer — providing a simple signalling mechanism for price discovery.

Accepting the offer transfers ownership of the token, allocating a portion of the sale to the creator(s) and paying a small platform fee, the seller taking the remainder of the escrowed funds. More info on fees be found here.

Rejecting the offer returns the money back to the prospective buyer and allows the current owner to signal what is not an acceptable price for re-sale.

We will also be sending out email alerts for each of these items if we have an email address on record for the seller, buyer and artists.

Much work has gone into building this feature, getting us to this stage will hopefully provide a good baseline from which to evolve.

Improving offers UX

As part of the work undertaken we have addresses a confusing and legacy part of the KO platform, offers!

Every account page now has a unified Offers tab which will show all active offers on newly created editions and collected artworks in their wallets, as well as all active offers they have placed. We have completely overhauled the system of offers and hope the newly improved flow will be welcomed by all.

Along with this change we have changed how users interact with the platform, using modals more extensively to focus on the underlying action in hand.

Thats a wrap

I hope everyone likes our first small steps into the secondary market, we’ve put lots and lots of effort into getting this feature over the line in the last few months.

Next we will be focusing on exploring additional artist verification steps, new auction mechanics as well as spend some time adding a few commonly requested small features from the community.

Please do let us know what you think and any feedback you have for us.

Join the telegram group and chat with other collectors and artists alike or follow us on twitter @KnownOrigin_io for more updates and collaborations.

James (May the 4th be with you 🖖)

KnownOrigin update — May 4th 2020 was originally published in KnownOrigin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

User profiles, data insights, monthly stats

February has been one of those heads down and get stuff done type of months. February was generally busy, not only has KO done more in terms of sales than ever before, we’ve also made some pretty big changes to how the belly of KO functions. But before coming to those things lets cover some stats from last month.

📆 February Monthly Stats

• Primary sales — 165 ETH+($38540)
• Secondary sales — 12 ETH+ ($2793.40) OpenSea data
• Top single sale goes to Giant Swan for Purgatory — the spectacularly immersive WebM on KO — selling for 10ETH ($2663.00)
• 628 editions created 🖌
• 770+ artworks sold 🚀

Platform changes

To give you some background, we spent some time in over the new year taking a step back and trying to priorities our development efforts on KnownOrigin for the new year a head.

We identified a few keys areas which need to be addresses before the platform can scale to a larger number of artists and collectors, these included amongst other things the following three big areas, all of which required large amounts of engineering changes.

• Enhanced image handling — we took our first steps to address this last month with the rollout of new image uploading and imaging conversion services ✅
• New media types — at the start of this month we rolled out WebM, WebP and SVG support, including support for audio 🎵 and video 📽 aiming to give more feature rich formats for artists to express themselves. ✅
• Removing dual profiles — we had a confusing user and artist profile concept which last week we hopefully fixed ✅ (minus a few initial bugs 🐛)

This ticks off a few of the big areas we needed to tackle in order to sleep better at night and hopefully make the platform scale up to much larger numbers of users and artists in the future.

User profiles

User profiles has replaced the dual artist and user concept with a single, unifying your profile regardless of who you are

We have introduced new fields to bring your profile to life such as location, profile images, full bio’s and social links.

We are hoping this will improve onboarding both artists and collectors to the platform and removes a large piece of technical debt which existing in the system the alpha version.

There’s still a few loose ends to tie up but we hope everyone likes what we tried to prove possible.

Data Insights

Public blockchains such as Ethereum are funnily enough, public, as is all the data which exists on them. We have been trying to build some tools which helps surface this information for all to see in a palatable way.

As you are may be aware we’ve carried on chipping away at this for several weeks with mixed success. This week we’ve been finalising hopefully more insightful data and adding two new features on the platform, providing more information on both the concept of editions, sales and collectors.

The first addition to come is the Collectors dashboard, we now simply show the top 100 collectors by ETH spent. Along with total number of purchases and when they first made a purchase on KO.

Second addition is what we are terming Insights, this is the first attempt and trying to surface valuable and interesting information about the sales for multi-edition artworks. It attempts to highlight some common and hopefully interest facts about editions and there sales, likes, number of owners amongst other things.

Thanks for all the feedback form the community on this. If you have comments or suggestions on this data then please do join the telegram group and let us know. 🙏

NYC.NFT

KO has been on the move 🚆 ✈️ 🛥.
David moore (aka Selfmadeheroes) headed over to New York for nft.nyc . The trip started with an epic 15 hour journey from Manchester to New York. Unfortunately due to late arrival in JFK David missed the infamous ‘Speakers Dinner’. The conference began at 08:00 on 20th Feb and had a wide range a topics and speakers which led to an interesting mix of attendees. David joined a panel on the main stage with Topper Bowers, Chris Lee discussing ‘anonymous identities’ and how this works in the real world. This topic is of particular interest to KnownOrigin as we started out life as a fully anonymous platform. David explained some of the challenges the team faced in the early days during the panel discussion.

The conference was fast paced and saw lots of speakers throughout the day, this intern led to the Q & As being cut short which was a shame. David also had the chance to meet with a number of delegates, artists and collectors. such as Scott from Portis, Jon and Zack from SuperRare, Bae and Judy form DaDA and Rimas from DappRadar. David was keen to meet with some NFT collectors and share some ideas, he met with J1mmy.eth and Token Angle and artists Connie digital, Josie and spent some time chatting about interoperability and personal smart-contracts vs platform approach.

The event finished at 18:00 and some of attendees and speakers moved to the after party, this was at an Irish pub 🍀 around the corner! The drinking 🍺 and chatting went long in to the night. The future of #NFTLand is very exciting and we are equally excited about KnownOrigin being in the thick of the conversations and wider eco-system discussions.

ETH London

Myself and the rest of the team headed down to london for ETH London where we hacked and won a prize for “Loan Shark” 🦈. An NFT leasing concept where you can add even more utility to your NFT tokens in a trustless fashion, even earning DAI per second for the privilege. Read more about it our BlockRocket blog or the devposst below.

LoanShark

Whats next?

We have a few things in the pipeline and getting the Insights over the line, plus a bunch of new artists to be added but then we will start exploring some new auctions and marketplace mechanics.

That’s all from today’s update, thanks for reading.

Be sure to join the telegram group and chat with other collectors and artists alike or follow us on twitter @KnownOrigin_io for more updates and collaborations.

Big love… ❤️

The KnownOrigin team

KnownOrigin Update — March 6th 2020 was originally published in KnownOrigin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Updates, news and up and coming platform changes

Hi all, with the New Year now feeling like a distant memory, it’s been at least month since our last chunky update so it’s definitely time to let you know what we’ve been working on.

First I think it’s worth looking at the stats for January. We kicked off the year with the best month ever in terms of sales, as well as onboarding over 30 artists, and saw the largest amount of traffic to the marketplace since we launch.

A quick break down of the highlights:

📆 January Monthly Stats

• $33,000 in primary sales (212+ ETH in sales) 💵
• 630+ editions created 🖌
• 1500+ artworks issued in sales and gifts 🚀
• 65 collaborative artworks have been born since launch 👭
• Highest sale for the month goes to Rare Designer for Serenay GEN 1 ༺Leͥgeͣnͫd༻ᴳᵒᵈ selling for $1286 (8 ETH) to collector picotech.eth 🔥

🏆 Records and 📰 News

Hackatao & The Whale 🐳

In early February, Hackatao released The Whale 🐳, an incredibly detailed artwork. This sold out an edition of 23, selling out in under 5 hours to 16 lucky collectors. Raising a total of 16.94 ETH, over $4000 at the time of sale — a real spectacle to watch unfold. Also a great demonstration of the power of awesome artwork sold in limited edition digital runs, congratulations Sergio Scalet 👏

KOD🐟 (KnownOrigin DAO)

Our second effort and a maturing of a curation and revenue generating DAO. With a little cash injection from a gitcoin grant 🙏 and some help from the MetaCartel, Andy Gray has been working on getting a simple Moloch based DAO with proposals, voting and fund management to generate multi-editions assets on KO — very ️on trend!

Next is to build a frontend, and to understand more about how it will be used and to look at what other DAO Ops tools we can leverage such as Signal DAO.

NFT London

January saw the team go down to London to speak at NFT London. We were greeted by an amazing bunch of NFT enthusiasts, a well organised event and free flowing beer 🍺. We had great fun meeting some collectors and artists in real life for the first time, the presentation is now available to view (see tweet).

NFTlondonUK - giver of $NIFTY on Twitter

The awesome @KnownOrigin_io presentation from our January's meetup is out!! If you have missed the event, or if you want to watch it again, here's the link👇👇👇 https://t.co/Kq4ys7NLuA @BlockRocketTech @CryptoKaijuIO

KnownOrigin on Cent

Last week James Morgan sat down to do a short podcast with Rizzle and Matthew from Cent for You Deserve a Drin¢ talking about all things KO and CryptoArt. He thoroughly enjoyed being part of it, something he hasn’t really done before so hopefully you’ll enjoy this insight. Be sure to check it out.

Trickledown 💰

In other news we’ve been working with Helen Knowles on an art project named Trickle Down: A New Vertical Sovereignty. In January it launched and will be touring around the UK, Europe and maybe further afield. It showcases the so called “trickledown” effect in the form of immersive video, audio and digital installations in combination with a smart contract enabled physical artwork which acts as the trigger, splitting real money between those participants involved.

Being involved in such innovative projects is a direct consequences of KnownOrigin 🙏 and provides great crossover from the traditional scene into this new world we are all part of.

Feature updates and highlights

As ever we’ve been chipping away at the never-ending list of improvements, feature requests and bug fixes we have for KnownOrigin, below is a flavour of whats we’ve been working on.

WebM — Video 📹 with Audio 🎵

Most notable to announce is support for webm — we have been slowly ticking off all the boxes needed to add this new file format to the platform and its nearly ready for prime time.

Now, we will very soon support much wider set of file types then we have ever before, including — jpeg, png, apng, gif, svg, animated svgs, webp, webm

We hope that additional new formats are well received and enjoyed by creatives and collectors alike. All new formats work on OpenSea bar a thumbnailing issue we are working with the OpenSea team to resolve. We are also aware that some wallets will not show the raw assets either but hopefully this will also improve with time and adoption.

Fundamentally it’s an experiment in launching richer media types so only time will tell if it works and there is an appetite for it.

Motion has captivated the art scene ever since the first film by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 brought the concept from idea to reality.

As part of the launch of webm the phenomenal VR artist @A_Giant_Swan has created an immersive artwork showcasing the potential of this new media type. Check out the artwork below and let us know what you think.

From a technical point of view webm represent a high quality, low size and open format which supports video and audio. Giant Swan’ first rendition above is a 58 second high quality audio and video visual masterpiece embedded in a file size of only 16mb!️ 🌸

EDIT: This SOLD OUT on it’s first day for approx. 2663 USD.

It’s not all perfect unfortunately in that Safari & iOS 😫 do not currently fully support webm but I think this is the first in a set of experiments in format types.

If there are other formats you want to see added, reach out and let us know on telegram and let us know what you think of webm: https://t.me/knownorigin_io

Image handling

This month has seen some efforts put into improving how artworks are uploaded to the platform as well as how they are then handled and served to visitors of the site.

After a few initial bugs we have seen site speeds increase, upload failure rates drop and load times have come down 🚤. We currently server approx several terabytes in bandwidth of image assets alone each month, representing one the largest infrastructure overheads for us as a platform. Providing a solid UX experience is key to really showing off the artworks in all their glory.

Serving artworks is at the core of the platform and something we will always need to manage, hopefully we’ve given it the necessary focus to expand the site further in the future. These changes also open the door to large file sizes and more complex assets in the future.

Login Improvements

We use the awesome open source web3connect project to present our users and artists with a selection of web3 wallet providers including injected providers like MetaMask as well also Porits, Formatic and any wallet which supports the Wallet Connect protocol (a personal favourite of mine)

With their latest update we now remember your provider of choice, automatically logging you in. So opening new tabs and windows should not mean you have to login every time, a commonly asked for feature.

Additional metadata

With the addition of new files formats we have made a few new changes to the metadata which should hopefully increase the interoperability of assets as they move around the Ethereum ecosystem.

• asset_type—each edition created will now have attached a new attribute which gives insights into the type of file attached to the NFT e.g. video/webm is set when a WebM edition is created. Also we are now fully qualifying all artworks with the correct file extension to help browsers in rendering and display them properly when not viewed on the KO site.
• external_uri — a non-standard but a widely utilised field in the space now points to the original KO Artist page. Soon as well all tokens on OpenSea will link to the actual token page on KnownOrigin as well.

Data Insights

A few months ago we release insights.knownorigin.io and we have continued to bring as much data to the forefront as we think is both useful, accurate and possible. This month we have fixed several data inconsistencies and have added a new page detailing high level stats on artists and their supply, including number of editions, total tokens issued, percentage sold vs gifted. We’ll be working on this more in the coming weeks. KO’s graph project can be found here and freely queried if anyone is interested https://thegraph.com/explorer/subgraph/knownorigin/known-origin

Edition Stats

We’ve been collating several key new metrics on editions, with the aim to gain some insights into how the cryptoart space is working and how editions are being accessed. Early examples of edition stats cover concepts on:

• Counts of sales, gifts and average sale prices.
• Total number of addresses which own and edition, gleaning multiple metrics such as total owners at purchase time, total history and the total number owners at present. Understand what is valuable and what isn’t is however hard to determine.
• Timing based metrics for sales such as time to first sale, total time until sellout and how often tokens move about.

If you have any thoughts on what data is useful and what you want to see please reach out to us.

We will continue to mine and surface data in the coming months

What’s next?

With only a small team we are often challenged with what to work on in the sense that priorities often change and trade offs exist in regards to speed and cost of making changes.

Currently our focus is on clearing up the artist/collector profile on the platform, merging these into a single identity which should hopefully clear up the minting, collecting and viewing journeys for those visiting the site.

Finally, later on in the month we head back to London to hack on a cool NFT idea we’ve had brewing for ETH London. More details will be announced but hopefully some new and innovative for the space in general…

That’s all from today’s update, thanks for reading.

Be sure to join the telegram group and chat with other collectors and artists alike or follow us on twitter @KnownOrigin_io for more updates and collaborations.

Big love… ❤️

KnownOrigin

KnownOrigin Update — Feb 12th 2020 was originally published in KnownOrigin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

December saw substantial growth for both KnownOrigin and the digital arts scene in general. We’ve been trying to put some understand behind the recent bump in volume but it's hard to pin down exactly what the root causes are, and we suspect it’s several things which have contributed to the recent growth of the sector.

Some thing which do spring to mind is the popularisation of non-fungible tokens in general, the rise and success of games such as Gods Unchained (after the Hong Kong Blizzard fallout) late last year added lots of public press and possibly brought many new eyes to the space.

NFTs across the board has seen an uptick in volumes, with CryptoArt not an exception to the rule, a solid and sound use case for the tokenisation of art has been tested and is playing out in the wild with good levels of investment and attention across all sites.

Also platforms like SuperRare Team have also seen some pretty special sales volumes as well as selling the one of the most expensive crypto arts piece that we have seen so far, Trevor Jones and Alotta Money selling ETH Girl for over $10,000! A landmark and massive achievement for all those involved, well done 👏

KnownOrigin as always has focused on evolution, releasing new features and pushing the platform forward. We hope we are helping and adding to the recent rise in NFTs and CryptoArt. All in all December has been great for digital arts, great for NFTs and great for all our artists, collectors and the platform itself, below are a few of our KO highlights.

📆 December Monthly Stats

• Top sale of the month goes to Rare Designer for “BLOCKCHAIN EDEN” selling for 10 ETH, $1483.90 at the time of the sale 🔥
• $25,000 in primary sales (181+ ETH in sales) 💵
• 458 editions created 🖌
• 1518 artworks sold 🚀
• 200+ bids placed / 127 accepted 🔨
• XCOPY selling all 25 editions in 37 minutes, 88 seconds per sale! 💸

Feature update and highlights

December saw several new features go live and several features reach the testing phase.

Artist Collabs

A highly requested feature is a way to easily setup joint artworks that enables collaboration and allows for any funds generated to be split at the point of purchase. This is now a reality, the post below details this is more depth.

A smart way to collaborate

Email Notifications

We quietly rolled out the first version of artist and collectors communications over christmas, allowing collectors to set a username and email and they will be contracted on various activities such as being outbid and purchase confirmations. This is the first part of the multi-stage rollout and more changes are coming in this area.

CryptoVoxels Build

We have been late to the CryptoVoxel party but now after the gift of a parcel from WhaleShark we finally got down to building a KO gallery on CryptoVoxels. Its slowly taking shape and can be found below — soon we will be reaching out to anyone who wants to exhibit in the space. I also tried to write some scripts for the parcel but failed miserably, I hope scripting improvements happen in CV as I think this will unleash even more of the possibility of the metaverse!

New file types and video/audio support

I spent much of December testing out and exploring adding new file types to KnownOrigin and I can report we are nearly ready for launch.

I tested several including mp4, webm, webp amongst others and on day one our current plan is to rollout the following new files types:

• WebM— a web friendly video/audio format which is free to use and widely supported in modern browsers
• WebP — a modern web friendly lossless image format with good compression properties
• SVG — a scalable vector based image format also with great browser support

Along with this they are open standards and provide significant improvements over our existing set of allowed formats and do not have some of the patent issues which mp3/mp4 have. The above are also supported by the largest marketplace in the NFT space, OpenSea (https://opensea.io)

I think as a general rule, using as open formats as possible is preferable for the artwork and having the widest ecosystem reach should be aimed for to prevent siloed works in general, something at KO we believe strongly in.

There are still some changes left to make but we are not to far away from launching this feature. Let us know what you think and how you will use these formats.

KnownOrigin Subgraph

In December we begain expermitenting and started to build out the KnownOrigin subgraph — https://thegraph.com/explorer/subgraph/knownorigin/known-origin

The Graph provides a excellent service to build scalable GQL based solutions on Ethereum. We already have our own indexer and backend services at KO but the subgraph can be used and queried publically which is a nice feature. Have a play about see if you can find some relevant information on our Subgraph, we will carry on making more changes and utilising this in the future.

Thats all for this update, we have more changes going live this coming month so watch this space!

Come join the telegram group and chat with other collectors and artists alike or follow us on twitter @KnownOrigin_io for more updates and collaborations.

Big love… ❤️

KO crew

Some us some love by sharing and giving us a clap or two for the post!

KnownOrigin update — December 2019 was originally published in KnownOrigin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

New features, mainstream cryptoart exposure, increasing volumes in the market and the world takes a closer look

November has seen a busy set of updates to KnownOrigin, with a general aim to polish some under loved areas of the platform and a focus on how to expose more of the artwork to collectors and visitors alike.

We have also kicked off work on two large features which should hopefully enable more collaboration on the platform and expose new types of artwork to collectors and users of the site.

In the month of November we have onboarded more than 170 artists since KO inception, over $5500 💸 in sales revenue generated and 275 editions created for the month 🎨.

Not only this, there has been some great cryptoart exposure in the form of DADA (@PowerDada) and SuperRare at the TATE. Showcasing some amazing talent and grabbing some quality exposure from the wider arts world. Check out the live stream here.

Lets kick off with a quick recap on platform updates…

Activity changes

We started trialing splitting up a single activity feed into different streams of activity including Creations, Sales, Offers and All. As well as designing these streams to expose more useful information to the consumers of this data. There’s more work to do in this area but seems to be going well from initial feedback.

Self-service modernisation

We’ve not really given this area any love since its first inception nearly 8 months previous, and having been used to create over 1200+ multi-edition artworks, it’s time was up!

We have attempted to provide a cleaner and more usable set of features, also giving us more wiggle room for some up and coming changes to this area in the not to distant future. Additionally we have put more emphasis on artists accepting confirmation about forgeries and possible copyright issues which have come to light in recent weeks in the space.

The final change to this area come after a few backend improvements and internal testing we have made a modest file size increased to 35mb per edition. In our opinon there exists a balancing act between being able to capture the true beauty of an artworks assets, along with clarity of expression from the creator, portability and performance. We hope to increase this again after we understand how well these changes settle in.

Better notifications

This month we rolled out BlockNative’s notify.js solution, replacing our internally built solution which was aging and quite frankly worse. We think and hope the improved feedback mechanisms will help collectors and artists understand transactionality as they interact with the blockchain through KnownOrigin.

Etherscan images

KnownOrigin now supports showing the artwork images directly on Etherscan, this should hopefully help those buying to more easily verify artwork. A nice edition bringing the artwork directly to the bare metal of the blockchain on the most popular and familiar block explorer of Ethereum.

ENS Support

ENS represents a step forward in ease of use to blockchain application, normalizing ETH address to a more human readable form.

All addresses listed on KO now fully support ENS, bringing to life some of the creators and collectors to show the resolved ENS names. We have managed to listed ourselves as on the official site to show support for this great feature of Ethereum ecosystem. https://ens.domains/

This wraps up novembers noticeable platform changes, watch out for more changes hoping to go live during December as we iterate and tweak the marketplace, get in touch if you want to help or have ideas you’d like us to consider.

Next take a quick look over the last month at some of the more noticeable highlights highlighted here at KO HQ.

🌸 DAO Osaka SELLS OUT 🌸

Our first deepdive in the world of decentralised autonomous organisations, better known as DAOs. DAO Osaka was spawned as an experiment to crowd sauce the creation art with the aim to raise a small profit for those backing the project.

This month all editions sold out, generating a total revenue of approximately $1400 dollars from a commissioned $900 in the form of 8 editions. A small but tidy profit for those involved and fundamentally proving out a model which is more valuable to the market in the long term.

🌸 DAOSaka DAICO on Twitter

💥 SOLD OUT 💥 All @DAO_saka artwork is gone after a flurry of activity on @KnownOrigin_io last night (maybe after a @officialmcafee comment on #cryptoart piece on @SuperRare_co) Congrats to all the artists and @meta_cartel for supporting this experiment https://t.co/3m1KULlG5v

Cryptoart forgeries

Copies, forgeries and fakes are not new in the artwork and just as tokenisation brings benefits of portability, ownership and additional revenue streams unfortunately putting them on “the blockchain” it does not prevent such problems arising.

However, saying that we think blockchains can bring a better level of verification and validation, its simply a case of educating collectors and building some tooling to help highlight and quickly verify artworks.

Recently some very well known artists have highlighted this as a problem in the tweet below.

Trevor Jones 🎨 on Twitter

Hey @opensea this is THEFT! Take my artwork down immediately. I've given no one permission to sell my work. Does anyone know a #crypto Intellectual Property lawyer? Please RT.🤬 #cryptoart #decentralized #ETH #ethereum

Tom ₿adley on Twitter

Forgery is the highest form of flattery... but it hurts the market as a whole. With the exception of my first #NFT tokenized on @knownorigin , all my #banknote NFTs have unique serial numbers. FAKES exist on @opensea ... don't buy screenshots, check those serials! #oldschool

A few things we have recently done to help improve this are:

• Ensure that all newly created editions on KnownOrigin explicitly state confirmation of originality, copyright and single source of sale.
• Enabling images on etherescan allowing users to view raw blockchain transactions for KO and see the underlying asset itself.
• Surfacing more information on our activity to show browsers as much detail as possible.

There is plenty more work to do in this area with new tools and checks to be put in place but as a community this is something I think can be resolved between everyone.

KnowOrigin Swag

In a short period of time David moore (aka Selfmadeheroes) knocked up a swag store to have some fun and test the appetite for KO swag.

https://gendoato.squarespace.com/ <- check it out…

Several orders coming in and ourself getting far to giddy over the merch, hopefully we will see more of this in the future if time permits.

Thats all for the monthly update, come join the telegram group and chat with other collectors and artists alike or follow us on twitter @KnownOrigin_io for more updates and collaborations.

Big love… ❤️

James and the KO crew

Some us some love by sharing and giving us a clap or two for the post!

KnownOrigin update — November was originally published in KnownOrigin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Share-a-bility and discovery of artworks on KnownOrigin just got a whole lot better 👊

We’ve just rolled out a new set of features to KnownOrigin which should hopefully allow collectors, artists and users to find new artworks and surface some of the long lost hidden gems 💎 which can get swallowed up in the daily flow of new creations on the site.

A quick update on platform stats before we go into new features:

📆 Monthly Stats

• Top sale of the month goes to Brad Ionson “Nudes At The Beach” selling for 2 ETH, $342.54 at the time of the sale 🔥
• 185 editions created this month 🖌
• 263 artworks sold 🚀
• $4000+ in primary sales for October (23+ ETH in sales) 💵
• DAO Osaka in profit — $1200 in awarded in commissions, $1270+ in sales generating small profit for all shareholders 👭 👬
• Somnium Space collab raised $700+ in sales plus 1000 cubes for each winning artist 👾

🔥 Platform stats for Oct. 2019

• 3847 artworks sold or gifted from KnownOrigin ❤️
• 157 artist onboard the platform 🎨
• 1221 editions created 👑
• 148 ETH raised for artists (excluding collaborations)💰

🙌 Month re-cap

October has been a busy month for the KO team, kicking off the month we launched DAO Osaka in collaboration with MetaCartel for DevCon 5, followed closely by a collaboration with Somnium Space (see Somnium Space).

Increasing exposure to KnownOrigin and its artists, experimenting with new models for funding and value creation as well as partnering with new and exciting NFT players in the space. Both have been a great success and example of how collaborations can benefit all parties involved.

In addition we are working with DApp.com to cross-promote KO artwork and raise awareness of both platforms — watch this space…

Another first for us is that Franky Aguilar started issuing tokenised Certificates of Authenticity (COA) using KnownOrigin, read more about it here.

👶 New features

Showing more work from artists

On the edition page we now surface a randomised selection of other artworks for sale from the same artist. The goal is to show collectors what other amazing artworks are on offer from the same artist.

Searchable tags

From the edition page all tags are now searchable. Clicking a tag will take you to the gallery page and filter for all artworks which contain that tag.

Sharable Gallery links

From today you can now share links to the gallery which will filter on artist on scarcity and on tag . The goal of introducing this feature is to allow users, artist and collectors to make it easier to surface and share artwork with others, for example:

• All Rare, Rubberstamp works by Mattia Cuttini — https://knownorigin.io/gallery?tag=rubberstamp&artist=0x576a655161B5502dCf40602BE1f3519A89b71658&rarity=rare
• All Pattern works by Stan Ragets — https://knownorigin.io/gallery?tag=pattern&artist=0x9155e2c7dB48d01d9dc419D1F18a088DeD25C009
• All Ultrarare works tagged with Eye — https://knownorigin.io/gallery?tag=eye&rarity=ultrarare

We hope this will allow users to quickly share collections with each other and display more digital artwork with a wider audience. Let’s get the social fired up 🔥

Improved UX Web3 Connect

We have enable multi-wallet support via the awesome web3connect. KnownOrigin now works in all browsers with or without MetaMask! This is made possible by leveraging portis and Fortmatic as well as all WalletConnect enabled wallets. We will be monitoring the impact of this change and making adjustments to it over time. Thanks for the support from these partners.

There are other login types supported which we will be looking to integrate in the near future, let us know if you use something else and really need to get it onto the platform.

Thats all for this months update, come join the telegram group and chat with other collectors and artists alike or follow us on twitter @KnownOrigin_io for more updates and collaborations.

Big love… ❤️

James

Some us some love by sharing and giving us a clap or two for the post!

KnownOrigin update — October was originally published in KnownOrigin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fix up look sharp … latest KO changes and platform updates — new UX + searching for artworks just got a major boost 🚀 🔥 🎨

With features like self-service being plugged into KnownOrigin the last few months, the gallery and the site in general was in a need of a good lick of paint. Over the last few weeks we have been working on simplifying the look and feel and hopefully making it a more enjoyable experience for both artists and collectors.

Today we took our first steps and applied what we hope is a cleaner look and feel to the whole site, pairing back component UX to be less obstructive and hopefully giving more emphasis on the artworks themself. It’s the first part of hopefully a larger UX re-fresh which we’ve been in need of for a while.
More to come on this front in the future, below is Alex Shell’s awesome LGBT Indian 🚀 🔥

Filters, Sorting & Browsing

A long time coming, this week we got down to adding the first batch of filtering and sorting options to the gallery.

Firstly we have added a quick link feature using the top 20 tags, including ‘most recent’ & user generated content.

Some of the things you can now do to find the right artwork:

• Scarcity filters - Ultra rare (1 of 1), Rare (1–10), Common (10+)
• Sort by Price (high <> low)
• Sort by Scarcity (high <> low)
• All, Recent and Top 20 user tags

We will be assessing the usage of these in the coming weeks as well as adding more filters as they are requested. Please get in touch using the links at the bottom of this post and let us know what you think of the new features or features you’d love to see.

Filters will also be rolled out to other pages in the future

A wider platform update

I wanted to give a quick update and give some figures on the platform as a whole.

• 518 Editions created 🎨
• Approx 20 editions created each week since self-service launched 📈
• 99 artists onboarded (hopefully lots more to come) 🧨
• 2250+ tokenised artworks have been issued from the KnownOrigin Smart Contracts 🔥🔥🔥
• In the past 30 days we had 1.3 million API function invocations. This covers lots of things on the site, not just front facing pages but it does show is steady growth and utilisation. 🚀🚀🚀
• Public APIs are also now available and is being used by at least one person we know. Please reach out to us if you would like to utilise the. 💾
• David moore (aka Selfmadeheroes) & Oliver Carding both recently went over to NYC for New York blockchain week whilst the rest of the team watched jealousy from rainy Manchester. They flew the flag for the team on various projects of ours such as KnownOrigin, NiftyFootball and CryptoKaiju. Some of David’s thoughts on the RAREAF2 gathering can be found here.
• DAO what…? After my original writings on the Arts DAO subject, and after receiving such interesting and positive feedback, I wanted to give a small update. I am part through further investigation into governance and reputation systems, its mainly a research piece for my own understanding. I am also speaking with some people over at MetaCartel who are nearing the launch of a MolochDAO fork — thanks to pet3rpan for the intro to the cartels varied and big hitting collective.

Also iDAF is coming up in a few weeks, we will hopefully meet face to face with some of the people I have only ever virtually spoken to, I am very much looking forward to the festival an meeting people for real!

In the meantime, please let us know any feedback and feature requests and we will carry on rolling new UX changes and features in the coming weeks.

It’s been a pleasure— James

Start your digital art collection now, head to KnownOrigin.io

Also remember to say “hello” on our telegram channel or twitter @knownorigin_io account.

Big love… KO Team

BE ORIGINAL. BUY ORIGINAL.

KnownOrigin Update — June 8th was originally published in KnownOrigin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

⚡⚡Platform improvements to enable handling much larger numbers of artists and artworks ⚡⚡

It’s been a long time coming but we have put significant effort into upgrading the underlying platform architecturally to scale and offer frictionless experience.

Over the last few months we have seen several issues arise from the way the application was original built. We knew that in order to grow and to reach the goal of self service oriented platform this needed to be fixed before anything else. There is no point adding more of the good stuff if you can’t handle the increase in demand.

Today we have rolled out a new and improved KnownOrigin dApp, you should not notice to many things aesthetically different but the underlying platform architecture has changed dramatically. I wanted to give an overview of the changes and the reasoning behind it:

EventWatcher

We have reworked our existing event watching tool which is responsible for listening to our contracts and reacting to them.

Currently this drives things like the Activity page, the Feed, as well as the newly introduced telegram alerts channel. We have also added to this the ability to show USD prices and dates.

TransactionListener

We have introduced a new application into our platform which is a TransactionListener, this provides more fine grain controls and triggers when things happen on KO smart contracts.

Telegram Bot

Our first foray into Telegram with an alerts channel & bot, this is an enhancement to push non-intrusive updates to those who are interested about what’s going on with the platform.

Public APIs

We have always believed in open source tooling and all of our code and contracts are open source and verified on Etherscan. In addition to this we will now start to offer API access to the KO platform. Starting off with simple things like looking digital asset data, artist’s collection, trending and likes. All this information is freely available but exposing via a traditional API allows greater flexibility for consumers.

Infura?

Over the past few months we have had several reports of issues loading the site, therefore, we are attempting to decrease our reliance on 3rd party hosted tools. With the enhancements mentioned above and the new APIs we have now delivering 75% of the site’s pages without interaction with Web3/Infura. This such offer a more consistent end-user experience all round.

What’s next?

Now we are much more confident the application can scale to larger volumes of users, artists and artworks we will now shift focus to new features driven by user research and feedback.

Some insight into the things we are thinking about:

• Self service submission— this has been asked for and spoken about lot. We have already done some research into how this may work. We will now start solidifying the match towards this goal over the coming weeks and months.
• Stable coins — we have been speaking to KyberNetwork the last few weeks and they have provided some good insight into how this would work to allow purchases in things such as DAI. Stable coins are a hot topic at the moment and we will look to integrate one or more in the future.
• Improved Search — we already have some ideas on simple filters and searching which needs to be added. This will become increasingly important as more content get listed.
• Better ways to communicate between buyers and sellers — I’d like to do this in a decentralised way making it part of the artwork. More research is needed but its not an unsolvable problem.
• Explore possible integrations of a decentralised identity/user profile service such as uPort — we are not set on this but I feel giving users the choice on this may help personalise the experience.

We work on KnownOrigin not for money but because it’s fun and we love it. We are passionate about it success and as it provides good challenges and invaluable learnings for us. ❤️

We’ve learned so much about tech, the community, art and ourselves and as we approach the first anniversary of the go live of the alpha: April 2018. We are proud of the progress we have made and recognise our mistakes. We are constantly impressed with the work and projects in the NFT space and as it matures we hope to be part of it.

Start your digital art collection now! dapp.knownorigin.io

Come say “hello” on our telegram channel or twitter @knownorigin_io

Big love — KO Team

🎨 BE ORIGINAL. BUY ORIGINAL.

If you have enjoyed this article please show some love and give us a 👏 or ten!

KnownOrigin Dev Update — Jan 2019 was originally published in KnownOrigin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi everyone, after a few fairly big changes which introduced features such as price controls, gifting, and auctions we have refocused our development efforts towards the mobile experience and to surfacing more information about the blockchain and an assets provenance.

Firstly, we have tightened up the mobile view hopefully leading to a better mobile experience, introducing a burger menu for quick navigation, a new heading bar and fixing the mobile view by utilising more screen real estate to give buyers a better view of the assets.

Secondly we had an unexpected review by Proof Suite this month and it raised some points which had been on our backlog for a along time and hearing it from someone else reaffirmed the need so we’ve added them.

From this week for all KODA V2 assets we began to surface 4 new badges:

• A ERC-721 badge linking to the 0xCert validator which inspects our contract and confirms our compliance to the ERC-721 specification.
• A link to the IPFS hosted data associated to each asset.
• A link to the transaction which created the asset.
• A link to the transaction which took ownership of the asset.

With this we hope to show more validity in the tokens which can be purchased, we are an open marketplace in the respect that we only provide a window in the awesome artworks that the artists on the platform produce, if KO goes down then the assets live on forever.

Along with this we have made some less sexy but completely necessary backend changes. We have exposed a new API to confirm with Matthew Tan (etherscan) requirements for displaying images associated to the ERC–721 tokens, we have reached out to them to enable this for KO tokens.

More changes have been made to our event parsing tools which watch and react to contract changes such as buys, sell, transfers this powers the activity page on KO site.

We have a long list of feature request over the last few months and we plan to tackle them over the coming months, from small UX changes to better artwork visibility and the ability to tip or donate to artists.

If you have any more feedback please reach out to us on our telegram channel or twitter @knownorigin_io account and let us know what you think.

Peace out 🎨… KO Team

BE ORIGINAL. BUY ORIGINAL.

If you have enjoyed this article please show some love and give us a clap or ten!

To find out more about BlockRocket.tech follow @BlockRocketTech. We provide engineering and consultancy in the Blockchain space.

KnownOrigin update — November 2018 was originally published in KnownOrigin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.