Online Art Marketplace for Collectors

An online art peer to peer exchange that gives collectors the ability to buy and sell fine art privately or publicly, with estimated prices determined from data analysis of previous auction results and other data points.

Key Project Numbers AND Facts

13 weeks

to MVP

Art

industry

10M+

auction data points

15k+

MAU

React, Python, React Native

technology

Mobile, Web

platform

Business Challenge

LiveArt, a US-based company, started with a goal to solve three major issues in the art world that stop collectors from buying or selling and keep the vast majority of art works off the market. These are difficulties in pricing a work of art, the tension that exists for collectors between privacy and the desire to sell, and transaction costs.

Upsilon started working on the project from the very beginning and participated in the MVP development, where our main goal was to create an art database. It included all the information about thousands of artists and millions of artworks with an estimated market value computed by LiveArt’s AI algorithm.

After the successful MVP launch, new goals arose and we started scaling the project. Our next major tasks were to develop a mobile application for both iOS and Android and create live auction sales broadcasting for it, continue developing new features for LiveArt Analytics such as sharing function, deep linking, global search function, and create LiveArt Market (now LiveArt Trading Floor) and LiveArtX.

Solution

We joined the project in its early stage. Therefore, our team was rather small and consisted of 6 developers (3 back-end developers, 2 front-end developers, and 1 machine learning engineer) and 1 project manager for the work coordination, task, and development management. As tasks started to be more complex, our team was joined by more developers with different skills and experience, project managers, QA engineers, and designers. At the scaling stage, around 35 specialists were working on the art selling platform from the Upsilon side.

The scope of our work laid in quite diverse directions and technical fields, from mobile to live auction sales broadcasting and NFTs. Let’s look at some of the core products of the global fine art marketplace that we developed:

Each artwork has the following data on the LiveArt application:

Also users can see similar artworks they might be interested in. The similarity algorithms are made by Upsilon’s machine learning team.

As for the artist page, we provide the information about:

After the art database MVP development, we started working on the MyCollection feature. The goal was to attract collectors to the platform and give them the possibility to estimate the price of their collection. To do that, collectors need to upload artwork and fulfill all the details.

Then LiveArt Estimate will provide the most accurate price in this particular moment based on the AI technology. Then, following the mobile-first approach, this functionality was left only in the mobile app for convenience and ease of use.

Trading Floor

Trading Floor is a mobile and web-based application for sellers and buyers of artworks. The main idea of the art trading platform is that users can place their requests to purchase the artworks they want, and sellers can offer them what they have in real-time.

It includes the following functions:

Ability for potential buyers to request the artworks they want via special form (wishes);
Ability for the sellers to offer their artworks for sale;
Sorting and filters;
Search by both Buy or Sell requests;
Ability to manage Trading Floor requests via the LiveArt CMS developed with Retool;
Users verification flow based on Onfido digital identity service.

Mobile App

Along with the LiveArt team, we developed a cross-platform mobile application on React Native in 3 months and released it to markets. Mobile developers continue to constantly release updates and add new features.

This mobile app almost completely duplicates the web functionality. One of the distinguishing features of it is live auction sales broadcasting. With it, users can see all the bids in real-time, as well as the auction results.

The main requirement for the mobile app, including live broadcasting from 4 major auction houses, was to complete it within 2 months.

LiveArtX is an end-to-end Web3 solution for minting and selling NFTs. It allows the creation of fully customized and branded Web3 applications for clients where they can sell their NFTs. The platform provides support with everything from ideation – including access to its network of content and artists – to infrastructure, to implementation and maintenance. So now art galleries can create and curate their own NFT marketplace.

Our task was to develop the following functionalities:

Payment functionality to allow clients to set up their NFT stores with payment feature (payment via credit card and ETH);
Component-based UI infrastructure that allows LiveArt to build websites for the clients faster and then change UI and copy without any deployments;
NFT creation hub and NFT minting feature;
User account and settings;
User authorisation flow (sign in and sign up);
API that provides all needed NFT-related information.

The NFT platform that we developed provides a few distinct benefits for everyone in the ecosystem:

Artists get more exposure for their work;
Collectors have a single platform for the best fine art NFTs;
Galleries onboard their artists to Web3 and curate the NFTs on the platform.

Result

The Upsilon team joined the project at the MVP stage and managed to develop an online art marketplace from scratch. This solution gives collectors the ability to buy and sell digital and physical art with estimated prices determined from data analysis of previous auction results and other data points.

This art marketplace allowed our client to:

Attract more collectors to the art database;
Increase the number of transactions on the Trading Floor;
Provide artists and art galleries with a platform to present NFTs.

We continue working on the LiveArt online art marketplace, adding new features and technologies and constantly improving the already existing ones to help our client deliver exclusive collecting experiences to a global audience.

Upsilon has been a partner of LiveArt since our launch, growing with us from a handful of team, members to over 20 cross functional developers, helping us with design, backend, front end, product management, QA, and DevOps. As we grow our company, my first call is always to Upsilon to help us with our resourcing needs.