Street-art gallery's operations and artist royalties inside an NFT platform

A database and a payment provider would have covered most of the rest. The cost of that route is Totemo holding money owed to artists, a creator record checkable only by asking Totemo, and an asset that lasts as long as the company does. Everything that moves no money and settles no entitlement stayed in an ordinary back office: moderation, reports, the catalogue, user administration and the events.

That line shows up in the path a piece took. Seven steps stood between a wall and a buyer, and the platform carried every one but the second, which happened on the street and in the studio. Below is the path an artist took when submitting their own work. A personal manager publishing for an artist followed a shorter one, without the review at step four.

1. Totemo approved the artist. Staff confirmed a person could publish through the gallery. Where a manager acted for an artist, the artist granted that permission first.
2. The work was prepared digitally. Totemo photographed the street piece and, for some works, made animated material with the artist.
3. The work was defined. Artist or manager entered the details and chose a single token or multiple copies.
4. Totemo reviewed the submission. A staff member checked the artwork and the artist information before it could go further.

5. The terms were set and the piece was placed. On acceptance Totemo set its fee, the artist's share and the royalty. Artist or manager then chose how the piece was offered.
6. The token was created on Ethereum, linked to the artist, the piece and the owner.
7. The work entered the catalogue. Collectors bought it, and the money went where the terms said it should.

Step one is a signed transaction, and so is every other grant of authority, each paid for by the party granting it. Staff authenticate an artist by scanning their wallet QR code, which also creates their studio page. Nothing about joining came out of the artist's pocket.

Representation is the only grant that runs both ways. A staff member offers to act as an artist's personal manager, the artist accepts or declines from their own wallet, and competing offers cancel the moment one is taken.

When a manager published, what they signed was the token data. The signed authorisation went to the backend and waited there, and the token was created later inside the buyer's own transaction. Totemo recorded the artist as creator, and the resale entitlement belonged to the artist regardless of who had signed. The manager did the work, the buyer paid the gas, and the artist kept the authorship and the money.

Separating the signing wallet from the creator record and the payment right is smart contract development work.

One limit we set on purpose: offers and auction finalisations always went back to the artist to decide in their own wallet.

Steps four and five are one moment in the gallery's terms: what is shown, and on what. A decline sends the piece back to be amended. A manager publishing on an artist's behalf sets the split directly, without a separate review, because a manager is already a staff user.

The terms then travel by signature. The backend signs them, and the buyer's transaction carries that signature to the contract, so the deal agreed at approval is the deal the sale executes.

Six placement types were available, constrained by contract type. The matrix above has the set and its rules.

Auction, buy now and flash sale were eligible for lazy minting, so the buyer covered the minting cost and an artist could put work on the market holding no cryptocurrency at all. Gift and open for bids mint upfront, and there the publisher pays.

Nothing was absorbed for the people spending money: a buyer with an empty wallet was sent there to buy cryptocurrency and come back. Ethereum was the chain because that is where those buyers already held their money.

Fee, artist share and royalty sat on the piece itself, over a platform default, with a separate split for each event. Recipients could include the artist, Totemo, the collector on a resale and the owner of the wall. That is the same problem asset tokenization work meets whenever the asset is not uniform.

A wall owner needed no account and no login. Totemo held a payout address for them against the event, and the contract paid it when a piece from that event sold. A gallery can promise that and then chase it by hand.

Those rules ran inside Totemo. The same problem under regulation, with heavier controls, is the securities tokenization platform case.

Staff could suspend a bidder, block or delete an account, find a user by wallet QR code and cancel an auction. They also ran the events much of the work came out of, each with its own location, materials and split.

Reporting covered sales by type, time, trade size, seller, buyer and every money recipient, plus earnings by period and bid activity as CSV. Having told four parties they each have a share, Totemo had to show each of them what arrived.

Alongside the tokenised catalogue sat roughly 5,000 works that were never minted, so an artist's range could be shown without everything being for sale.