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It all started in 2017 with the Swisscom entrepreneurship program, called “Kickbox”; which supports employees to work on their ideas. Ricardo Gurnari and Tom Rieder shared the vision to replace black screens from living rooms and meeting spaces, and instead bring digital art to these lifeless monitors.
Then, in 2018 elementum won the "Kickbox Gold" award and founded dloop with the aim to: 1️⃣ bring affordable digital art to the world 2️⃣ provide the #technology to experience #art in a connected world 3️⃣ offer #artists and #collectors easy ways to trade and exhibit art.
Also in 2018, Sven Schumacher joined elementum as our CTO and we further onboarded Dr. Marlene Wenger as our curator. Marlene was the only one with a deeper understanding of art and its historical relevance and later, together with Georg Bak, they helped us navigate towards a curated presentation of historically important digital artworks.
We rewrote our credo and our main challenges evolved around: 🔹 AUTHENTICATION: How can the provenance and ownership of digital art be verified and not be altered?
🔹 CREATING LIMITED EDITIONS: How can artists set the edition numbers and price point for their work, and how can those be tracked?
🔹 DISPLAYING DIGITAL ART: How can digital art be displayed to a broad audience of collectors?
🔹 PROFIT FROM TRADING: How can artists profit from lifelong royalties when their artworks are traded on secondary market?
Image below: Tom Rieder, CEO, Ricardo Gurnari, COO, and Sven Schumacher, CTO, Foto: WB / Alain Amherd, June 2019
We wrote a white paper for an ICO, unfortunately Swisscom, our lead investor at that moment, wasn't able to support us. That’s why we decided to go the traditional way of finding angel investors.
During that time (in 2019-2020) we faced a problem: Investors didn’t believe that people would spend more than $50.- for digital art (can you believe that? 🤯).
In 2021, through our innovative technology, we won several awards among others the best of Swiss Web Award which helped us to connect with our new lead investors... this leads us to July 2022 and Tokengate's acquisition of dloop and our marketplace elementum.art.
Image below: The elementum team wins gold in the Digital Commerce category (Source: Netzmedien)
Our team and expertise has expanded, together with Tokengate we work towards making elementum the leading digital art and NFT platform that makes it easy to buy and collectNFTs with crypto and/or a Credit Card. In addition, our curatorial programme, lead by Georg Bak, allows collectors to collect the true pioneers who created historical and important art.
Image below of the current elementum team with Frieder Nake, at his NFT drop and group exhibition "Liebe Maschine, male mir".
