Proof-of-Stake Non-Fungible Tokens, the Distributed Autonomous Organization, and the Valuation of Art: A Proposal for a Nonprofit, Community Controlled NFT

Abstract

Abstract This paper describes a way to use blockchain-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to address some fundamental failures of the art world introduced when the early-twentieth-century evolution of financial markets expanded to include objets d’art as commodities. It proposes the creation of a distributed autonomous organization (DAO) that uses domain experts’ Delphic consensus methods embedded in smart contracts to provide NFTs with meaningful nonfinancial assessments of intrinsic artistic qualities and merit. Full details of the blockchain implementation and organizational development are online, registered at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/3DF4W with the Open Science Foundation as a large-scale participant/observer social science experiment.