Boson Protocol and Superchief Gallery tokenize art collection valued at $5.1 million

Tokenization continues to attract interest from the art industry, even as the sector cools off from its dizzying highs in 2021.

On August 26, Boson Protocol, a tokenization platform, and Superchief Gallery – which claims to be the world’s first real-world NFT gallery – announced that they had partnered to tokenize a $5.1 million art collection.

The collection includes 85 unique pieces by artists such as Louise Nevelson, a 20th-century sculptor whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Buffie Johnson, an American abstract artist, and Ibram Lassaw, a sculptor associated with the New York School of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s.

“Our partnership with Superchief is a sign of the revival of markets and the appetite for tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs),” said Justin Banon, co-founder of Boson Protocol. “As markets return, we see more and more asset classes – including art – wanting to be tokenized and sold to emerging markets via new technologies.”

Users can purchase non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through the Boson protocol, which represent ownership of works included in the collection.

Superchief Gallery was originally founded as an artist-run gallery in Brooklyn, New York in 2012 by Edward Zipco and Bill Dunleavy. The project embraced the burgeoning NFT space in March 2021 with the launch of Superchief Gallery NFT in March of the same year.

Since then, the wallet has participated in several major tokenized art projects, including working on Christie’s auction house’s first CryptoPunk auction, co-founding the NFT Art Biennial in Italy together with Art Blocks in 2023, and co-founding the NFT Korea Festival in 2023.

Tokenization of art

While the majority of RWA tokenization targets financial assets, with the market capitalization of tokenized financial RWAs increasing 40% from $7.89 billion to $11.7 billion since the beginning of 2024, tokenization can facilitate the representation of a diverse range of assets on-chain.

In 2021 Everydays: The first 5,000 days, An artwork in the form of an NFT JPEG by renowned visual artist Beeple became the third most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction. The token fetched $69 million and was sold at Christie’s Auction House, the oldest art auctioneer in the world.

That same year, PleasrDAO purchased a one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang album for $4.75 million. Users can buy NFTs representing fractional ownership of the album for $1 each, with each purchase moving the album’s scheduled release date forward by 88 seconds from the year 2103.

In June, Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital Holdings issued a multimillion-dollar loan collateralized by tokens representing a 1708 Stradivarius violin. The loan was made to Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands, who purchased the rare violin at auction for more than $9 million.