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Editorial Coverage: Despite COVID-19’s impact on galleries,
auction houses and retailers, the global art market circulated more
than $50 billion in art, while other collectibles such as coins and
trading cards saw record sales. Amazingly, an estimated 10% of art
is stolen annually, and an estimated 50% of all sports memorabilia
is estimated to be fake per the FBI. To get a flavor of just how
difficult it is to know if something is stolen and replaced with a
near-perfect forgery, Interpol’s stolen artwork database has
more than 50,000
items across 134 countries listed in it. Experts note that
scams and hacks are already hitting
the exploding market of digital collectables known as NFT’s
(non-fungible tokens). Taking the collectables world by storm, a
non-fungible token is a unit of data on a blockchain ledger that
represents a unique underlying asset. As with most other things,
crooks flock to where the money is, and right now NFT’s provide
plenty of money and new vulnerabilities. That’s exactly why
FACT Inc. (OTC: FCTI)
(Profile), a
recognized global leader of fine art and collectible authentication
technology, has recently expanded into the burgeoning NFT market.
Shares of companies with interest in or association with NFT’s have
enjoyed a nice advance lately, including CurrencyWorks Inc. (OTC: CWRK),
Takung
Art Co. Ltd. (NYSE American: TKAT),
Oriental
Culture Holding LTD (NASDAQ: OCG) and Jiayin
Group Inc. (NASDAQ: JFIN), as investors seek exposure
to the popular technology in the collectables market.
- NFT’s are one of the hottest market segments today, with the
combined market cap of major NFT projects increasing by 1,785% in
2021.
- FACT Inc. uses forensic technology to authenticate and analyze
fine art and collectibles capturing unique hashes from the forensic
data.
- FCTI is expanding into the NFT markets, using its suite of
proprietary technologies to become the first company effectively
linking NFT’s with physical assets.
- The company secures its highly customizable data packages for
clients with blockchain technology.
Click here to view
the custom infographic of the FACT Inc.
editorial.
NFT’s Explode onto Wall Street
NFT’s are digital tokens that prove the authenticity and
ownership of a digital asset. An NFT is a unique file stored on a
blockchain that certifies ownership of the digital asset and direct
representation of the underlying asset and its value.
The “non-fungible” in NFT simply means that the token is unique
and can’t be replaced with something else. To lend some clarity
through a physical example: a dollar bill is fungible. It can be
swapped with another dollar bill and have the same function and
value. A 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card, the world’s
most expensive baseball card, which sold for $5.2 million in
January, is non-fungible because there isn’t another card identical
to it. The same goes for a Monet painting, only it couldn’t be
directly linked to an NFT because it is a physical asset
— that is until now.
An NFT can be anything digital: a song, a video, a GIF or even a
tweet. Sports videos are spiking in value, including an NFT
of a video clip of a
Lebron James dunk recently selling for over $200,000. The
white-hot commodity today is art, as evidenced by Mike Winkelman, a
digital artist known as Beeple, selling his JPEG titled, “Everydays
— The First 5000 Days” at a Christie’s online auction for a
stunning $69.3 million, including fees. Just as with any great
piece of artwork or cultural property, replicas or copies can be
made for distribution, but NFT’s are the one-of-a-kind
original.
With worldwide reach, FACT Inc.
(OTC: FCTI) is revolutionizing
security for the art and collectibles market. Using forensic
technology presently used by global law enforcement agencies for
ballistics, FACT provides products and services to authenticate and
analyze fine art and collectibles. FACT offers an eponymous turnkey
suite of products, called FACT, an acronym for Forensic Asset
Certification Technology, for comprehensive data collection and
tracking to ensure the authenticity of any item.
The software application uses blockchain, an immutable digital
ledger, to store all pertinent information including
authentication, condition reporting, GPS tracking and provenance
data, that is available in real-time to the appropriate parties.
The FACT software application is applicable to an array of
customers within the fine art and collectible industry including
secured lending, insurance, dealers, artists, auction houses,
grading companies, and private collectors. None too soon, servicing
the NFT market has been added to the FACT portfolio of
offerings.
White Collar Crime Meet Next-Gen Protection
Adapted from the ballistics industry, FACT uses forensic
technology and applies it to the art authentication industry. More
specifically, the company has developed cutting-edge technology
using noncontact, nondestructive white light interferometry, an
optical method for surface height measurement to generate
three-dimensional scans capturing more than 100,000 images at a
resolution of two microns, a level impossible to forge. The
technology is so precise that it can detect nuances such as a paint
brushstroke in a forgery leaving a thicker line of paint than an
original, a detail that could never be noticed even by the most
trained eye.
Once a scan of a collectable is recorded, FACT isn’t done by any
stretch. If a valuable is to be transported, it is scanned again
using FACT analytic software to verify the authenticity, tracked
using GPS technology while in transit and scanned again once it
arrives at its destination. All scans are recorded and stored,
maintaining a constant record of condition (or changes in) and
providing a library of scans for future comparisons.
First Mover: FACT’s Physical Asset NFT’s
With flagship operations well established, FACT is now bringing
its expertise to the burgeoning NFT market, a market that has thus
far been limited to digital assets. FACT’s forensic technology
creates the important tamper-proof link needed to tokenize a
physical asset to an NFT. In other words, just as Beeple’s
$69-million digital image was permanently affixed to a digital
token, FACT will be able to do this with a framed Picasso hanging
on a wall by creating a scan using its proprietary imaging
technology, a first for the industry.
The strategy is bigger than just being the first to connect
physical assets with an NFT. FCTI management says it plans to not
only offer NFT’s as a service to FACT clients but also to partner
with a platform to offer a seamless trading process to clients. If
indeed some pundits are correct that NFT’s will be the preeminent
way to buy, sell and collect digital art, FACT is making the right
move with its authentication technology combined with in-house
auctions. Christie’s, a 255-year-old auction house branching out
into the space for the Beeple auction, certainly lends credibility
to the future of the market. FCTI is positioned to bring the
unique transactional benefits of NFT’s to transacting physical
assets changing the way buyers and sellers interact in the market
forever.
The Blockchain Architecture
The totality of the existing FACT platform architecture
dovetails perfectly with this expansion into NFT’s. The company’s
system provides a secure home for all the requisite provenance
records, database of scans, etc., neatly packaged and protected on
the FACT blockchain. These records store all necessary
documentation for seamless creation of NFT’s of a tangible object
or a digital recreation of the object with user-specified smart
contracts for near instantaneous execution of transactions between
buyers and sellers.
Securing the documentation on the blockchain is part-and-parcel
to an NFT. Each NFT is customized to a client’s specifications and
can feature any number of complex mechanics. Usage analytics,
royalties, value enhancements, restricted specified displays,
capped supply and usage restrictions are only a few of the
customizable options that can only be confidently protected through
blockchain architecture such as that built into the FACT
system.
Polishing the Edges
NFT’s are a bit reminiscent of Bitcoin a number of years ago.
Traders are jumping into the space simply because of the buzz word,
most likely with little understanding of what they actually even
are. That has provided a boon to a number of stocks as the trend is
only now getting underway. Fact is, much like Bitcoin, people will
be educated on NFT’s gradually because it is a market squarely
facing the younger generations that are deeply rooted in a digital
world.
CurrencyWorks
Inc. (OTC: CWRK), formerly known as ICOx Innovations, has been
a pioneer in the blockchain and digital rights protection for
years. The company was instrumental in the development of Kodak’s
first digital tokens for protecting its customers digital photo
property. The Los Angeles-based company operates its CurrencyWorks Collectibles NFT platform, is
working to create the first NFT for the Barrett-Jackson Auction
Company and recently partnered with XTM Inc. regarding a NFT
payment platform scheduled to launch this quarter.
Takung Art Co.
Ltd. (NYSE American: TKAT), a Hong Kong-based company, operates
an online trading platform for art collectors and investors to
acquire shared ownership in Asian and other fine art. Takung generates revenue via services from its
online electronic platform and is experiencing improving financials
underscored by a healthy art and collectable market in Asia.
Oriental Culture
Holding LTD (NASDAQ: OCG) is another that has felt tremendous
volatility in its stocks owing to a connection to NFT’s. The company, through its Hong Kong subsidiaries,
provides online collectibles and artwork e-commerce services, which
allow collectors, artists, art dealers and owners to access a much
bigger art trading market where they can engage with a wider range
of collectibles or artwork investors.
Jiayin Group
Inc. (NASDAQ: JFIN), a Chinese online individual finance
marketplace, is in the same boat as TKAT and OCG insomuch that its
stock has made moves in both directions because investors may be
betting it is expanding into
the NFT business. The crux of the conjecture is that the
company has the infrastructure to facilitate transparent and fast
connections between investors and borrowers, a business model that
aligns with deals in the NFT markets.
According to Forbes, the combined market cap of major NFT
projects has increased by
1,785% in 2021, not even a full three months into the year. New
NFT’s are hitting the market every single day with no signs that
the craze is going to slow in the near future.
For more information about FACT Inc., please
visit FACT Inc.
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