What is BOROBORO?

BOROBORO is an open-source decentralized app (dApp) that provides provenance and authentication solutions to works of art using Ethereum and IPFS.

BOROBORO purposely avoids additional operations surrounding the transaction of artworks. It does not seek to provide a customizable smart contract that governs artist royalty or other shenanigans. BOROBORO is a dApp that focuses on abstracting the complexity of interacting and minting on Ethereum and blockchain for creatives and art businesses.

Motivation

BOROBORO is an open-source project created for CS191: Senior Project at Stanford University.

Combining my interest in blockchain and contemporary art market, I wanted to create a dApp that seeks to address certain problems within the art world for my senior project. Based on my research, provenance appeared to be an issue naturally addressed and solvable by applying emerging blockchain technologies. As a result, BOROBORO was created.

Contact

winniex [at] Stanford [dot] edu

Why is authenticity & provenance a problem in the art world?

Provenance is the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of an art or historical object (Wikipedia). Provenance has become increasingly important in helping establish the moral and legal validity of a chain of custody. Sometimes, a piece with interesting provenance may increase its value. Most of the time, however, provenance is important in confirming legitimate ownership and authenticity of a work of art. Unscrupulous sellers may forge provenance to take advantage of collectors.

Read more on the problem of provenance at these sites:
https://www.artbusiness.com/provwarn.html
https://news.artnet.com/market/the-importance-of-provenance-in-determining-authenticity-29953
https://www.lofty.com/pages/what-is-provenance-and-why-is-it-important

How does Blockchain help?

By minting an artwork on the blockchain, creator(s) of an artwork can securely add, verify, and transfer the artwork. BOROBORO seeks to provide a simple and minimalistic interface to enable creatives to use the blockchain in such a way.

Previously, there lacked a secure, single source of truth for the provenance of an object of art and provenance may be a highly disputable issue. For an old artwork, the loss of a written record could mean the loss of its provenance. The digital and decentralized nature of the blockchain provides a trustworthy and resilient single source of truth. By using it, we achieve the goal of securely recording provenance-related events.

Why open-source matters to art provenance?

Currently, there exists paid agencies and companies that offer artists and galleries blockchain solutions to provenance and art certification. Nonetheless, a centralized institution governing the minting and transferral of works of art fundamentally goes against why blockchain would be helpful in solving the problems of provenance and authenticity.

As an open-source project, BOROBORO is rooted in the philosophy and practice of decentralization. Decentralization is the only sustainable and helpful medium through which we can provide a reliable single source of truth for works of art.

Step 1

An artist or their representing gallery connects their Metamask wallet account to BOROBORO on the explore, mint, or update pages. They mint an artwork on Ethereum via BOROBORO by submitting the form on mint page. Upon minting, their Metamask wallets will be deducted the corresponding amount of gas fees, which is dependent on the traffick on the blockchain at the time.

The artist/gallery receives a unique token ID upon successful minting. Their artwork becomes available to view on Explore page. Now, the work of art is officially on Ethereum, in which corresponding metadata (date, artist, images) are hosted on IPFS (Interplanetary File System).

Step 2, 3, 4...& Beyond

When the title of the artwork changes hands, the current owner updates the ownership by submitting a request on the update page. The Metamask wallet address must correspond to the current owner of the artwork.

First, the owner provides the token ID of the artwork that they want to update. Upon verification of rightful ownership, they input the wallet address of the new owner.