Twenty-five years of Artfacts, and an object's history recorded sale by sale

A database built by hand

Artfacts began in 2001, at the end of the dot-com boom, with no funding. "We operated from a basement, Stine had a second job, and her income paid the employees," Marek Claassen remembers in the anniversary interview Artfacts published on 9 October.

Most of the information came from galleries, by post, from all over the world. Each exhibition was entered by hand. In his words: "You open a letter with an invitation card and text about an exhibition. So you put the card on a scanner, start the scanner software, and it gets scanned. And then you upload the picture, type the artist name, title, description, opening, everything by hand. This was not very effective. But it was the only way."

The boxes of those invitations still stand in their office. The site was built in five languages from the start. The art market, as Stine Albertsen puts it, "was too small just to build for the local market."

What that patience made possible

In late 2004 Artfacts published its Ranking of artists, built from their exhibition histories. By January it was in The New York Times. The story spread around the world, and the traffic crashed the company's servers.

One of their biggest challenges, the founders say, was to get people to understand that the Ranking "had nothing to do with money". It measures exhibitions. Before Artfacts, in Marek Claassen's words, "there was especially nothing that structured primary art market activities."

Artfacts lived through the crisis of 2008, which halved its gallery subscriptions almost overnight. Twenty-five years on, it is moving towards "near real-time coverage of institutional bodies that are representative of the art world". Marek Claassen: "I would think that many people can't imagine the art world without Artfacts."

We are among them. A market that knows where an artist has been shown, and by whom, reads that artist differently. That knowledge exists because a small team opened letters and typed them in for years.

The other half of an object's history: its sales

Exhibitions are one half of the story an object carries. The other half is its sales: who owned it, when it changed hands, and at what price. That record is usually scattered across auction catalogues, invoices and family papers. Much of it was never written down at all.

This is the half CoArt Market works on, and we want it kept without anyone having to type it in. Every object on CoArt Market has its own cryptographic certificate. Every sale on CoArt Market is recorded on the Symbol network as a transfer of that certificate, when the sale closes. Once written, that transfer cannot be edited by anyone, us included. It carries its own date, which anyone can read in a public Symbol explorer.

Soon the transfer will carry the amount of the sale as well, in the note written with it. Then the date and the amount of every new sale can be read on the network itself, not only on the object's page.

What a person reads is the object's provenance ledger, on the object's page. It follows the object from the day its certificate is created. From then on, every sale on CoArt Market stands in it: when the sale took place, and for what amount.

The private details of the people in a sale are not disclosed. Each side appears under the name they chose for their profile, and the transfer on the network carries no names. Legal names and contact details are not published.

What came before the certificate is the history the seller disclosed, with the papers that passed review. Those papers are kept permanently in the certificate too, so the next owner inherits them with the object.

From a record of sales to a record of value

Artfacts measures attention, and deliberately not money. A market needs both records.

An exhibition history tells the market who is being looked at. A history of sales, kept over years, tells it what objects actually changed hands for. We want CoArt Market's ledger to become that kind of record: how an object's value moves, read from sales that really happened rather than from estimates.

Masterworks, the American company, already shows what such a record looks like when an object is owned in shares. Its home page sets out the life of one painting, from purchase to sale. In its own words: "Figures shown are from the series offering of Mona Lisa, featuring Banksy: $1,039,000 offered as 51,950 shares at $20 per share under Regulation A. The offering was fully funded. The work was later sold and net proceeds were distributed to shareholders."

Across its platform, Masterworks reports "530+ works acquired, 32 sold to date, $77M+ distributed back to investors, including amount invested". It adds: "Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns."

Where CoArt Market is going

Our aim is to make the secondary market of high-value art and collectibles profitable for the people who take part in it. Today that market is objects traded whole. In time, we mean it to include fractional ownership of Blue Chip art and collectibles, including the resale of fractions. Fractional ownership is a core part of the system architecture, and we are working on it now. It is not available yet, and no figure is promised.

Today, objects on CoArt Market are bought and sold whole, between private persons. The full system cannot open under European regulation today. So we are working to move it to US jurisdiction and to obtain the licences it needs there.

In Europe, the first step is the collective acquisition of objects of historical and cultural value, to be shown in national museums, as soon as we obtain the regulatory approvals they require. Those who take part will hold shares of ownership, but no liquid shares at first. We are working on the US licences now; once they are obtained, those shares become resellable as well.

Whole or in parts, every sale is meant to stand in the same ledger, under the same certificate. That is how a market's memory of value is built: sale by sale, each one a transfer of a certificate that nobody can rewrite.

Sources

• Artfacts, "Twenty-Five Years of Artfacts", 9 October 2026, text by Katie-Rose Spence: artfacts.net/news/twenty-five-years-of-artfacts/
• Masterworks, home page, read on 24 October 2026: www.masterworks.com/