Coral, an online marketplace platform for NFTs, opens a door of opportunities to artists and art creators across Asia so they can easily make money from their skills.
Southeast Asia is a large exporter of arts, but the region’s artists lack the opportunity to market and promote their works to the world.
NFT, which stands for non-fungible token, refers to digital tokens that act like a certificate of ownership and live on a blockchain.
Coral aims to offer this opportunity to artists in Southeast Asia through the online marketplace’s potential and collaboration with its allies so that the artists, the brands involved, and their allies can work and create together.
Three strengths of Coral
Coral has three major strengths in expanding the NFT art market.
First, it has a system to verify the identity of artists before they can upload works onto the platform. This is aimed at preventing identity theft and protecting the copyrights and ownership in art works offered for sale.
The Department of Intellectual Property issues the pink badge “© Informed to DIP” for all NFT art works on the Coral Marketplace.
Artists register their works’ copyrights with the Department of Intellectual Property and include the registration number in their NFT creations. The data becomes part of metadata in the blockchain as reference to protect the copyright of the artist involved.
The second strength of Coral involves its Ethereum international standard, which is used for more than 70 per cent of the trade of art NFTs.
NFT trade can be done in three simple steps — scan the QR code or visit the website coralworld.co, pay with Thai baht, and get the art NFT you buy.
The fact that payments can be made in Thai baht — whether through a credit or debit card, or a bank mobile app — allows ordinary people better access to art works.
Coral’s third strength is its offline activities that allow better access to target groups of the art works who are not necessarily online.
“Identity verification and payment with Thai baht through a normal method, not any cryptocurrency is the Ethereum international standard. Also, the focus on offline activities draws much response to Coral,” said Paul Arriyavat, head of Venture Builder at Kasikorn X (KX).
TDAF a proof for Coral’s success
The success of the Thailand Digital Art Festival (TDAF) underscores Coral’s strengths involving the artist’s identity verification and copyrights.
The festival was participated by more than 750 artists, with thousands of arts NFTs involved. Due to the high demand, the event was extended from March 5-20 to April 17.
It was Asia’s largest art fair in 30 years, featuring a huge variety of works by generations of artists — from deceased veterans to rising stars.
Also, it was the first time for an art fair to be held online and offline simultaneously. Art works at the event could fetch high prices — ranging from 25,000 baht to 2.85 million baht.
“The success proved that art works can be sold in the NFT form and art NFTs can fetch very high prices. The highest price was Thailand’s new record [at the time],” Paul said.
TDAF helps Coral to become Thailand’s largest marketplace platform for NFTs, in terms of the artist number and the variety of art works. Also, thanks to the event, Coral has been allied with the Department of Intellectual Property, resulting in Coral becoming a copyright-friendly platform.
Moreover, Coral collaborates with the Thai Red Cross Society in launching the “Digital Arts NFT: Red Cross x KX” exhibition featuring digital arts by Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. Proceeds are donated to the Thai Red Cross Society’s emergency fund for victims of natural disasters.
Coral is an international platform
Its goal is to become an NFT marketplace platform that is trusted by artists, said Paul. Through Coral’s integrated services, Thai artists can sell their works in the form of digital assets to collectors across the world.
Coral aims to serve as a platform that can generate incomes for artists as continuously and significantly as they earn from other channels, according to the executive.
At present, 150 Thai artists offer their art works for sale on Coral, with over 1,000 of them, in the form of image and video files. Of the buyers, 80 per cent are from Thailand and 20 per cent from overseas.
A plan is underway to attract more overseas visitors, with an online campaign to promote art works on the platform and a launch of the Coral Community.
The goal is to boost the size of overseas visitors to 80 per cent, as most prospective NFT buyers are from other countries while Thailand’s domestic market is still small.
With the focus on promoting Thai artists, Coral aims to gather as many of them as possible on its platform.
At Coral, there are three kinds of fee for the participating artists — the platform fee (10 per cent of the price), payment fee (2.5 per cent), and minting fee (set by the Ethereum network).
Coral uses “lazy minting”, which means the artists pay the minting fee only when their works are purchased. Coral also encourages lowering prices of art NFTs, to around 1,000 baht apiece, so that more people can appreciate them.
DeFi and beyond
As decentralized finance (DeFi) is expanding beyond the financial services, KX has extended its area of focus from just offering financial instruments.
Its Coral DeFi service can help other sectors with the ability to create assets in the digital world. Other services will be available after the ones related to finance and arts.
The NFT market, which was born in 2017 and became popular last year, is growing fast and gets massive today. Competition is tough and only strong service providers can survive in the market.
