Swiss digital asset bank Sygnum and art investment firm Artemundi announced the tokenization of the painting Fillette au béret, painted by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso in 1964.
Both companies indicated that the property rights to a work of Picasso, for the first time it would be shared through the blockchain public bank.
The investors will be able to buy and exchange “shares” of the work of art, through what they call Art Security Tokens (AST), according to a statement.
The bank will issue 4 thousand tokens of the work, each will have a price of 5 thousand dollars, which gives a total price to the whole of approximately USD 20 million. They will have access to accredited and institutional investor tokens.
After the acquisition of the tokens, which would turn investors into owners of the painting, the same they will be able to exchange the AST on the bank’s own platform, called SygnEx. When the tokens are sold, they will be settled in Swiss francs, using a stablecoin of the financial institution itself, called DCHF.
For the bank and for an art-related company, the importance of the project lies in the legal certainty of ownership provided by tokens issue.
«This tokens are recognized by Swiss law DLT (distributed ledger technology), and transactions on the blockchain are considered legally binding,” they emphasize in the brief.
For his part, Mathias Imbach, managing director of Sygnum, considers that the tokenization of Fillette au béret, exemplifies that there is a “universe of unique investment opportunities” that can be accessible to many.
Fillette au béret Picasso has toured museums around the world such as the Galerie Beyeler in Switzerland, the Moderna Museet Museum in Sweden, the Kunsthalle Nurnberg in Germany, the LACMA and the Phoenix Art Museum in the United States. Currently, the physical artwork is protected in a high security facility.
Tokenization in other areas of the economy
As in the case of Picasso’s painting, in other areas of the economy there are several companies that have used blockchains to tokenize property ownership or even the identity of a human being.
Last February, CriptoNoticias reported that a Spanish company carried out the first sale of a tokenized property in the city of Sevillesouth of Spain. On that occasion, the transaction was made on the Ethereum blockchain.
Likewise, last April, former basketball player Emanuel Ginobili, registered on the platform Proof Of Humanity (PoH), thus tokenizing their identity. This is a project developed on Ethereum that relates addresses on this blockchain with verified human identities and delivers, in exchange, a basic income in the UBI token.