Announcing Another VooGlue Site

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VooGlue has a New Site opened this week.

The Rosary exhibition space in Dalkeith, Perth now has a selection of VooGlue artworks on permanent display, where visitors can use VooGlue to view the artwork videos and purchase the right from their mobile device.

 

As VooGlue content is added it will show on the VooGlue map, so users can easily find nearby VooGlue content. For the art sector this is exhibition spaces, art galleries, artists studios, street art locations, and art in public spaces. Just go there, open the app, point your phone camera and ‘voila’ !

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Lessons From the World’s Largest Multi-Year Collaborative Blockchain Research Programme

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Let’s face it, distributed ledger technology or “blockchain” is still in the very early stages. Just as in the early days of the Internet, it’s still unclear what kinds of projects will succeed.

 

R3 is an enterprise software firm working with over 100 banks, financial institutions, regulators, trade associations, professional services firms and technology companies to develop Corda, a distributed ledger platform designed specifically for financial services.

 

Over the last two years, R3 has worked with hundreds of senior technologists from dozens of leading financial institutions. No other enterprise blockchain platform has enjoyed remotely the same level of expert input.

 

Chief Technical Officer at R3 Richard Brown, wrote a fascinating article in which he revealed, based on the last two years of research at R3, several key characteristics that are needed for an enterprise blockchain platform to succeed.

 

We at VooGlue were intrigued by this, and decided to take a look at each of the required characteristics to discover how VooGlue stacks up. So here they are, with our explanation after each point:

  1. Provide an integrated application, messaging, workflow and data management architecture.

The VooGlue enterprise blockchain functions (articulated in the whitepaper) include automatic payments to entities in the valuchain and the associated workflow required. The data management architecture for easily and securely updating an artwork’s records allows the providence of artworks to be permanently recorded in their own blockchain. With this in place, copyright ownership for payments of royalties, marketing affiliate and gallery records for payments of commissions, and the messaging functionality for these records to be easily and securely updated, is ensured. On top of this is an integrated token minting facility for easy tokenization of artworks, enabling artworks to function as investment items. Finally there are the access structures required for the blockchain to perform as a fully distributed database application where any correctly coded application can engage and interact with the VooGlue blockchain to access the data and perform transactions using an API.

  1. Build on an existing technology “mega-ecosystem” to maximise skills and code reuse.

VooGlue, as a distributed application, allows any stakeholder – for example an online gallery – to access via API all VooGlue facilities. This includes fingerprinting, accessing digital counterparts, and selling artworks without having to relist the artworks on a new platform time and time again. Stakeholders can be any stakeholder, from an artist to a major museum. VooGlue provides the shared distruputed database and access standards for all users.

  1. Eliminate unnecessary data “silos” to unlock new business opportunities by allowing real-world assets to move freely between all legitimate potential owners.

As artwork changes hands, moves to new galleries, and changes hands again, providence is lost. Each new seller must then relist the artwork and try and trace its history. The VooGlue blockchain brings this waste to an end. This in itself represents a huge achievement, but the VooGlue blockchain brings additional value by adding a digital fingerprint that may include digital media counterparts locked into the single artwork rather than spread all over the internet. For example if an artist has created a Youtube video of the artwork’s production, VooGlue enables that video to become permanently connected to the original artwork itself.

  1. Embed legal entity-level identification into the programming model to enable legally enforceable and secure transactions.

A VooGlue digital fingerprint once registered is singular and cannot be re-added, thus it offers the opportunity for legal enforcement of copyright. The blockchain built following that fingerprint provides a legal and irrevocable record of digital media counterparts and secure transactions related to posterity. It also enables the legal tracking of transactions related to digital media views, product counterpart sales, and artwork sales.

  1. Support inter-firm workflows for negotiating updates to the shared ledger to support real-world business scenarios.

The workflow of listing and marketing artworks, then the sales of artworks to new owners and the related financial transactions is the business scenario for which the VooGlue blockchain has been built. In addition, the VooGlue enterprise blockchain facilities this shared ledger to be accessed without rebuilding platforms or reinventing code.

  1. Enable the inevitable move to the public cloud without requiring high-risk technology bets.

VooGlue enables businesses interested in accessing the VooGlue enterprise blockchain the opportunity to do so without having to create an expensive platform themselves. Here we use our shared technology to save countless stakeholders high risk technological bets.

 

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VooGlue Bounty Campaign Kicks Off

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VooGlue is excited to announce the start of its Bounty Campaign. This is your chance to earn VooGlue Tokens (VGC) while helping to spread the word about a completely new art-ecosystem.

A total of 5% of all VGC tokens generated will be distributed in the bounty offering. This means that if all 55,000,000 tokens are sold, 2,750,000 of them will be distributed amongst bounty participants.

Bounty participants earn “stakes” for completing tasks that help VooGlue achieve its goal of distributing all VGC tokens amongst a wide variety of buyers around the world. These tasks include things like translating our whitepaper and publishing content about VooGlue. Translating the whitepaper, for example, earns you 1000 stakes.

At the end of the token generation event, all of the stakes earned will be added up. In order to determine the value of each stake, the total number of VGC tokens allotted for bounty reward (2,750,000 if all goes well) is divided by the total number of stakes earned. So for example, if the total number of stakes generated is 100,000 and number of VGC allotted for bounty is 2,750,000 (the maximum amount), then each stake will be worth 25VGC.

VooGlue is about to start its token sale with the price of VGC set at 500 per Ether. This means completing a task like translating the whitepaper could earn you a very lucrative bounty!

So get excited about VooGlue! Learn about our platform by reading our whitepaper and this blog. Ask questions directly to our team through our Telegram channel. Contribute to a project that is going to bring some much needed disruption to the art world!

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The Meaning of “VooGlue”

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When people first hear “VooGlue,” they often wonder aloud what the name means. “Sounds like a cross between Voodoo and glue,” is a common reaction.

VooGlue founder and CEO Brian Carew-Hopkins did in fact come up with the name as a combination of those two words. But since Voodoo has, like many ancient words, taken on a skewed meaning in popular culture (namely that of magical dolls with pins stuck in them to inflict pain on one’s enemies and the resurrection of the dead as zombies), it’s worth explaining Voodoo’s true meaning and how that fits together with VooGlue’s vision.

Voodoo is in fact a West African animist tradition that goes back at least a thousand years, with the current pop-culture component of it deriving much later from interaction with Haitian immigrants to the US. Benin is regarded as the birthplace of the Voodoo tradition, with the name itself simply meaning ‘spirit’ in the local Fon language.

What sets the real Voodoo apart in the modern context, however, is the way it survived in the face of the enslavement and cultural annihilation perpetrated in West Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries. At the time, Voodoo became a cultural “folkway”: a common understanding among local inhabitants that could not be destroyed by the European slave traders. Traditions and beliefs were passed down, often secretly, through the generations, surviving the invaders best efforts to obscure or eliminate them.

It is this reference to a truth that cannot be destroyed that makes Voodoo the perfect word to encapsulate what VooGlue accomplishes. Just as Voodoo was a way for a cultural truth to survive despite the efforts to destroy it, VooGlue enables the truth of an artwork’s origin, ownership, and meaning to survive no matter who possesses it and where it is located. This is accomplished with the use of a distributed public blockchain.

The “glue” in VooGlue refers to the permanent “gluing” of a multimedia counterpart to a physical artwork, again accomplished with mechanisms enabled by a distributed public blockchain. This multimedia counterpart could be anything from a time-lapse video of the art being produced, to a clip of the artist explaining the artwork. By permanently attaching this counterpart to an artwork, the artist’s true vision has a greater chance of surviving throughout the lifetime of the physical art, and even beyond.

Inspired by a culture that could not be destroyed, VooGlue’s mission is to ensure that art’s providence and meaning survive, and that the art world thrives for a new generation.

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