Thomas Crown Art: Mobile Payments Tech Cryptocurrency Can Beat Art Forgery

I’ve seen a lot of different uses for technology come and go, and for mobile payments, it’s no different. That’s especially true for cryptocurrency, which has been not only an investment property but also a potential replacement for currency and even a fulcrum for social change. Now, a new and exciting use for cryptocurrency has emerged. Rather, for its underlying technology, blockchain. Word from Thomas Crown Art recently sent our way says that blockchain can be used to prevent art forgery.

If that sounds outlandish to you, it did to me too, at least at first. Then, I got a look at how the combination of a widely-known art dealer, Stephen Howes, and Ian McLeod, an equally-widely known technology master, managed to put blockchain to work to beat art forgery.

Howes described how not only are forgers getting better at creating fake paintings, they’re also getting better at faking provenance as well. With blockchain systems, however, new art can be assigned a “store of value,” as McLeod describes it, and in turn can provide a kind of cryptocurrency wallet function for users to not only have that store of value on hand, but potentially be able to use it to make purchases.

Dubbed a “smART contract,” Thomas Crown Art’s system effectively turns physical artwork into a wallet, and all artwork and prints are recorded accordingly. When a new print comes onto the scene, if it hasn’t been recorded, then it’s much more likely to be a forgery than any other. A quick response (QR) code on the artwork itself is accessible only by the owner.

While it’s not a foolproof system—who decides just how much of that cryptocurrency goes into the initial walletization effort—it is a good way to set things up to prevent art forgery. By establishing the chain of ownership immediately from creation down through printing and so on, it becomes impossible to add to the chain without that addition being recorded. Plus, by making all art effectively worth at least something, more artists will be able to actually create because their basic needs will be met by the inherent existence of their art.

This could lead to a major expanse of art in general, and to think it all started with a mobile payments technology.