Blockchain has been making waves for the past few years and its applications, be it cryptocurrencies, smart contracts or NFTs have taken the world by storm. Eikowa (www.eikowa.com), one of Indias most progressive and leading contemporary art galleries, is now harnessing the power of blockchain for provenance in art, revolutionzing art with technology. Launched by Vaishnavi Murali, Eikowa is in its 7th year of operations. Focused on B2C business, currently Eikowa works with a network of approx 80 artists across senior and mid-career artists.
Eikowa: first to bring blockchain certification in India
Eikowa has always aimed to bring the best of art and technology together and is leveraging blockchain to ensure that every art piece bought from it can never be forged. This is achieved by having a clear link between a digital certificate published on the blockchain which cannot be copied, and then linking this to the physical art.
As per Vaishnavi Murali, Founder at Eikowa, “We are the first gallery in India to use Blockchain for effective provenance of physical art. Our solution is unique internationally, and we believe that as the world begins to realize real-utility use cases of blockchain, our solution will become the golden standard for provenance and authenticity. We are the pioneers in amalgamating technology with art to offer solutions that are customer centric. With the current solution we are tackling the grey area of unauthentic artworks.”
Each work purchased from Eikowa will have a non-replicable digital certificate registered on Bitcoin blockchain and a temper-evident tag containing this digital certificate, tagged to the physical artwork. These two components will ensure that the physical art is linked to a digital certificate making it impossible to forge the artwork. This will also ensure smooth verification of the authenticity of the artwork.
Vaishnavis brainchild, Eikowa started with a quest to provide a platform that makes buying fine art easy for its patrons, as well as to create a platform for senior, mid-career, and promising young artists to showcase their art to a wider audience. It started with Vaishnavis own experiences as both a hobbyist artist as well as a casual buyer where she could sense pain paints from both supply and demand perspective. She realized that this was her calling and armed with an MBA from the prestigious Indian School of Business and significant experience in the luxury retail segment, she took the plunge to entrepreneurship in 2015. Her focus since then has been to continually try new things to overcome the key issues stagnating the growth of Indian art market:
Lack of discovery potential and restriction to only selected artists
Lack of information which leads to anomalies in pricing as well as hesitation from buyers in terms of assessing optimal value for art
Perception of art as a complicated purchase
Through a curated platform, that focuses on bringing together the best of Indian contemporary artists (across senior, mid-career and promising artists), continuous research that focuses on original content generation, as well as an omni-channel experience spanning across its convenient web platform and view-in-your-house provisions, Eikowa has done a stellar job in solving for these issues. Additionally, Vaishnavi and her art advisors are always a phone call away to provide bespoke and complementary art advisory to those looking to buy art. Eikowa measures its success through the strong endorsement from its customers – roughly 30% of sales are from repeat customers, and approx 40% of leads originate from word-of-mouth endorsements.
Eikowas logo represents a digital overlay on the infinity symbol – its recent attempt is precisely an attempt to get technology to make it simpler for the art patrons to immerse themselves in the infinite domain of art and imagination.
For more information, please visit www.eikowa.com.
