Tokens for Hermitage frescoes were presented at the EEF

A new trend in the field of cultural heritage preservation was presented at the Eastern Economic Forum. The joint project of the Inteross group and the Russian platform Atomize was called “Digital Art”. As part of the project, unique digital codes – NFT tokens – were created.

Frescoes from Raphael’s workshop from the collection of the State Hermitage are available in a new format. It is symbolic that the works of the great master ushered in the era of tokenization of art objects in Russia. This is the first experience of cultural heritage management in our country.

To create tokens, photographs of the frescoes taken at the very beginning of the restoration process were used. Each of them was given an individual code and transformed into a digital art object containing the pre-restoration appearance of the work. Since the frescoes have already been restored, only token purchasers will be able to obtain individual digital rights to the image prior to restoration. Funds received from the sale of NFTs will be used for other restoration work in the Hermitage collections.

For their part, buyers will be able to use their purchases in a hybrid-digital format. Presenting the project, General Director of the Atomize platform Ekaterina Frolovicheva noted that this project is fully supported by the domestic platform.

“By joining tokens, that is, becoming a token holder, we become subjects of hybrid digital law,” she said. – That is, we acquire the right to an individual image and can dispose of it at will. That is, the token can be donated, sold or transferred free of charge, like any property.

In total, 60 “Raphael tokens” have now been released on the Atomize platform, which are divided in equal quantities between the three frescoes.

For Interossa, this project seems to be a logical continuation of the course towards digitalization of various areas of business (investments in the developer Reksoft and the platform for entrepreneurs Tochka). The company is an adherent of the digital economy and strives to use technologies, in particular blockchain, for the development of socially useful projects – as assistance to Russian museums in preserving heritage.

“Inteross has been supporting the Hermitage Museum for many years,” noted the group’s general director Sergei Batekhin. – And now our cooperation has resulted in such an interesting joint project. On the one hand, we want to draw attention to such a field of art as restoration, on the other hand. token technology allows us to preserve an object of art in the form in which it was before and after restoration. In a way, this is an attempt to create a unique image that no longer exists in real life, but is available digitally.