Indigenous Art Authenticity

Convert IndigeneArts.com to be a niche NFT marketplace featuring indigenous art, certified by digital certificates of authenticity.

unCommonThread.biz team has built a successful IndigeneArts.com marketplace featured in Forbes.

4 people in Canada

6 people in Ukraine

Relevant experience (continued)
Team of eCommerce and marketplace professionals that has built https://IndigeneArts.com recently featured in Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/afdhelaziz/2021/02/23/indigenearts-sets-out-to-immerse-shoppers-in-the-world-of-indigenous-cultures

Canadian team:
Marina, Co-Founder & CEO of unCommonThread.biz: Tech Entrepreneur and eCommerce Pioneer with over 20 years of experience in software development
Fraser, Co-Founder & EVP Strategy: Strategy, marketing and business development entrepreneur with over 16 years of experience that includes eCommerce, branding and consulting.
Dmitri, Senior Solutions Architect: Over 20 years of experience in architecting and developing solutions in the big data and analytics space, with recently discovered passion for blockchain, Cardano & Charles.
Victor, Senior Development Manager: almost two decades experience in software development with emphasis on process improvements, UI and front-end development, requirements gathering and mapping out complex software systems and processes.

Ukrainian team:
Alina: Project Manager
Evgeniy: Solutions Architect
Daria: Backend Developer
Dmitriy: Backend Developer (Integrations)
Ruslan: Frontend Developer
Gleb: Quality Assurance

Problem statement (continued):
This proposal is about the integration of the Cardano blockchain into a marketplace platform, which powers IndigeneArts.com, a marketplace for authentic Indigenous products and a community of passionate enthusiasts of Indigenous art and culture from around the world.

Although at first sight it may seem like a niche use case, it is really not. It has some interesting challenges, solving of which will benefit the Cardano ecosystem as a whole and could function as a perfect seed project for Cardano to become not only the world's financial operating system, but also the world's cultural treasury. It can then be applied to include any kind of art, music, crafts, antiques, collectibles, memorabilia and many more niches.

Indigenous online trade is much more complex than it may seem at first. It's a market upon which the survival of entire Indigenous communities and their cultures. The impact of COVID-19 has been devastating with the collapse of sales, foreign tourism and due to the nature of how social revenue is generated via local events, like powwows, has been exacerbated further. Turning to online sales using existing established platforms, such as eBay, Amazon or Etsy has proved to be highly problematic, since these platforms are flooded with mass produced fakes, which erodes trust between sellers and buyers and devalues authentic and highly valuable indigenous products.

The market size for Indigenous art and crafts in the U.S. alone is approximately $1B USD, but the Indigenous communities don't see most of that money and account for 15% of the world's extreme poor, according to a UN report. There are multiple reasons for this imbalance, among which is the inability of the indigenous artists themselves to properly price their products; lack of access to broader markets and auctions makes them think of their work as cheap and results in most of profits being accumulated by resellers and intermediaries, without any returns in the form of royalties from subsequent product placements or resales to the artists and their families. Therefore the ideas of perpetual royalties and fractional ownership are extremely interesting to explore.

Solution to the problem (continued):

The vision for this project goes along with Charles Hoskinson's vision to implement Cardano where people need it the most. Solving issues of product authenticity and trust, access to fair-trade decentralized online markets, implementation of royalties and records of ownership will elevate sustainability of often marginalized indigenous communities, which will tremendously benefit humanity as a whole.

This current proposal only covers a small fraction of this broader vision. Since we are celebrating the launch of Mary, it is only logical to start with the tokenization of art with native tokens to produce the certificates of authenticity and records of ownership, which are traced all the way back to the original creator. But here are some other ideas that are also equally important and correlate with the past and future Cardano releases.

• Metadata: Every indigenous work of art tells the story, where every feature has a meaning, deeply rooted in its particular indigenous culture. This meaning has been transmitted for the most part verbally from generation to generation and is prone to misinterpretation and extinction. Indigenous artists are eager to share their stories with the world, and preserving the description of their art as metadata in the blockchain, which can't be modified and tampered will be a very interesting feature for historians, anthropologists and anyone else in general.
• Smart Contracts: As mentioned previously, ideas of passing a royalty from every subsequent resale back to the original creator and fractional ownership could have a tremendous impact on economic sustainability of the indigenous communities around the world.
• Digital Identity: Certification of a product, as an authentic indigenous product, also involves confirmation that the author of the product is in fact of indigenous origin. This is a complicated subject as every indigenous community around the world can have different rules, but this is where solutions such as ATALA Prism could help by providing necessary links to the authorities.

Although the implementation of all of these ideas has many challenges, the IndigeneArts team has already started creating impact on a few indigenous communities in Canada.

• For the past 2 years, we've engaged in negotiations with two Indigenous non-profit organizations about the creation of a Joint Venture.
• We have partnered with a local Indigenous non-profit to engage the local Indigenous community in creation of the marketplace.
• We conducted a series of consultations with Indigenous artists to understand their pain points and to get their feedback on the direction of the IndigeneArts marketplace.
• IndigeneArts has provided new economic opportunities for indigenous artists during the pandemic.

The marketplace currently features over 500 works of art from over 25 Indigenous artists. It is still at its early stages, but this initiative has already created an impact on the lives of Indigenous artists as some survive purely from the sales of their artwork. Here is feedback from one of the indigenous artists, Joseph Sagaj, featured in Forbes article and which he shared on his Facebook page:

"Congratulations to Marina Korneeva and her amazing team at IndigeneArts for their persistent effort and hard work in promoting and marketing Indigenous Art, Craft, and Culture to the world! As an Anishnaabe Artist, I'm proud to be part of the amazing group of Carvers, Crafts People, Jewellery-makers, and talented Artists featured in Forbes. Miigwech to our supporters, customers, and friends that make this dream happen!"

IndigeneArts.com was initially implemented as Shopify marketplace to prove indigenous community participation in the project before committing to costly custom development. Now, when the idea has proved to be successful, we are in the process of developing our custom marketplace platform (unCommon Thread) and moving IndigeneArts.com to this new platform with additional functionality and improved look & feel.

As you can see from the attached mockups, we are incorporating product authenticity and seller verification into our platform and seeking funding and Cardano community support, to help us make this project successful. IndigeneArts.com will be the first specialized marketplace implemented on our platform with Cardano blockchain integration.

The Cardano solution could then be broadly used on other niche and specialized marketplaces, powered by our platform, like marketplaces for sports memorabilia, vintage products, antiques and other collectibles.
With this proposal we are also hoping to start a dialog with the Cardano community on their ideas of how to address the listed above issues. We want to do this to help indigenous communities as a pilot humanitarian project, which can later be more broadly utilized by any artist or creative person. With this proposal we join Charles Hoskinson on his idea(s) of people around the world being treated fairly, based on their merits, passions and productivity.

We truly believe that we can leverage Cardano to power the world's cultural treasury

Use of Funds:

Community Engagement - $5,000

Work with Indigenous partner organizations to engage various Indigenous communities in a discussion about rules for sellers verification and products authentication.
Currently the following communities are in our engagement plan:

• Native Canadian Artists:

• Anishnaabe of the Sturgeon Clan

• Cree

• Native American Artists (US)

• Iroquois from the Seneca Deer Clan

• Cherokee

Blockchain Development - $30,000

• R&D on using Cardano for product authentication and issuing digital authentication certificates
• R&D on physical art representation via digital NFT tokens
• Sales transactions in cryptocurrency with converting to stablecoins or FIAT currencies.
  All Cardano on-chain related code will be open sourced for the benefit of the community.
  We are also actively participating in NFT-DAO (Comprehensive NFT Framework Collab).

unCommonThread Platform - $180, 000
These are our estimates to complete our custom unCommonThread platform, which we are seeking to fund elsewhere. The support and funding for Cardano blockchain related use cases of product authenticity will make our case much stronger in the eyes of potential investors.

KPIs

• Number of positive responses/testimonials to our survey about digital Certificate of Authenticity to Indigenous partner organizations, artists and shoppers.

Yours truly,
- IndigeneArts team