Boson Protocol and Superchief Gallery Tokenize $5.1 Million Art Collection

Tokenization continues to capture the interest of the art industry, despite the sector cooling from its giddy 2021 highs.

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

The collection encompasses 85 unique pieces from artists such as Louise Nevelson, a 20th-century sculptor whose work was 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 during the 1940s and 1950s.

“Our partnership with Superchief is a show of resurgence in the markets and the appetite for tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs),” said Justin Banon, co-founder of Boson Protocol. “As markets return, we are seeing more and more asset classes — including art — wanting to tokenize and sell via new technologies to emerging markets.”

Users can purchase non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing ownership over works featured in the collection via the Boson Protocol.

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

The wallet has since participated in several major tokenized art endeavors, including working on the first CryptoPunk auction hosted by Christie’s Auction House on their first CryptoPunk Auction, co-founding the NFT Art Biennial in Italy alongside Art Blocks in 2023, and co-founding the NFT Korea Festival in 2023.

Tokenizing art

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

In 2021, Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, an artwork taking the form of an NFT jpeg created by Beeple, a renowned visual artist, became the third-most expensive work from a living artist sold at auction. The token fetched $69 million and was sold at Christie’s Auction House, the world’s oldest fine art auctioneer.

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

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