How Collections embodies Verisart’s vision to unite Creators and Collectors
At the end of last year, Verisart quietly launched a big update to its service – Collections.
Creators and collectors have been creating and collecting Verisart’s blockchain-backed Certificates of Authenticity, but there hasn’t been a way to organize them — until now. Verisart Collections offers a dedicated space for users to organize, personalize, and display their art.
To explore the thinking behind the feature and reflect on its impact for our artistic community, we sat down with Harry Zeng, Product Engineer and lead architect behind Collections.
How did you begin building Collections?
It started, of course, with the problem we’re trying to solve. We recognize that once collectors receive a Certificate of Authenticity from a creator or gallery, there’s not much they can do with it beyond printing a physical copy or transferring to a new owner. Therefore, we wanted to build a way for collectors to share their collected pieces with their own communities.
What influenced the design and development of the feature?
Working in the art world, I understand that presentation matters. The way artworks appear significantly impacts their perception and value. I wanted to reflect that in the usability of the feature.
How did you take into consideration the needs of multiple user groups?
This was a key point in the development process. We recognized that different types of clients will use Collections differently. While the end goal was to add value for collectors to show off their acquired works, we also realized that it’s creators that predominantly use our platform to authenticate their art using our blockchain-backed Certificates of Authenticity.
Collections is therefore fully customizable, allowing creators to equally tell their story and galleries to organize certified works by their represented artists. But crucially, it’s incredibly easy to create a Collection regardless of your subscription plan — even users on a free plan can use the feature.
We’ve put a lot of thought into the flexibility of the feature. It’s possible to combine the different types of certificates we offer in a Collection, so collectors with Certificates of Authenticity can add their Registered Records just as easily. Certificates can be shown in an unlimited amount of Collections, and each can be customized to tell the story the creator, collector, or gallery wants to share.
What has the uptake been like?
It’s been fantastic! We’ve heard positive things from our clients, but importantly, we’re seeing engagement from both creators and collectors alike – exactly as we’d hoped. Admittedly, as we build up our collector features, we’re seeing more engagement from our dedicated creator base, and we’ve shared our favourite collections on social media. Because the feature has social media sharing embedded into the Collections page, we’re likewise seeing creators actively promoting their own work on their channels.
What are your planned next steps?
There’s lot of ideas of where this can go in the future, especially thinking about discovering more works by the same artist or being able to contact other editions holders. We’re still enhancing the Collections feature with additional customization, but the biggest update in the works is the ability to see a specific creator’s collections from the Certificate of Authenticity page.