• "20 Minutes" launches into the world of cryptos with the auction house Piasa and tells you, in the form of a diary in several episodes, all the stages of the project.

  • Every week until October, we tell you how we organized the first sale of a newspaper NFT in France with the house Piasa.

  • In this second episode,

    20 Minutes

    tells you how the audacious Piasa auction house was associated with this project.

    Welcome to the virtual crypto-arts odyssey.

In the first episode, I told you how

20 Minutes

decided to embark on an extraordinary virtual epic: transform the supplement “Les folles années 2020”, a six-page digital issue, into a non-fungible token (NFT). When generating the token on the Rarible platform, I wanted to partner with an auction house to copy Beeple or Tim Berners-Lee (the creator of the World Wide Web who sold millions of dollars the source code of the Web in NFT) and auction this collector's number in a public sale.

Some of the biggest American NFT sales have been organized by an auction house.

Christies for Beeple, Sothebys for the World Wide Web and Artist Pak, and even the French auction house Millon for a lot of 13 NFT.

The sale moved to Belgium for legal reasons.

With the naivety of the layman, I contacted the famous Anglo-Saxon auction house Sotheby's to offer them my project: to auction off a

20 Minutes issue

that has never been printed to make it a unique issue of its kind.

A sort of collector's item and a first in France for a newspaper.

How to refuse such an idea?

And yet ...

Piasa, the badass agency

Sotheby's response is clear: “NFTs goods fall within the framework of intangible goods and are not currently authorized to be sold in France”. First news ! However, I am not discouraged. I make an appointment with the Sales Council, the regulatory authority for the public auctions market in France, to find out more about this and try to find a way to overcome this obstacle (the first of a long series).

Pierre Taugourdeau, Deputy Director of Legal Affairs at the Sales Council, explains to me that “intangibles, such as digital works, NFTs and copyright, for example, do not come within the scope of sales. voluntary public auction ”, but“ if you add tangible property to the sale of NFT, it is possible to auction the two together. »It would suffice to accompany our NFT with a poster from the front page of the digital newspaper or an offset printing plate (a metal plate generally used by printers to issue several hundred thousand copies of our newspaper) to that the auction can take place. This last idea is all the more impactful since it would be a printing plate of a number that has never been printed.The meeting of the Web and the print.

But it will be without Sotheby's, which does not prefer to take risks.

“Without clearly defined legislation, Sotheby's, in compliance with the legislation in force, does not organize an NFT sale in France,” the house wrote to me.

No better on the Artcurial side.

Millon, who seemed to bite the hook, no longer responds to my requests.

Too bad… I am not discouraged for all that.

If all the auction houses refuse to be associated with this project, it will be a good anecdote to tell in this logbook.

"20 Minutes" goes down in history

I'm on the verge of dropping the case when I think back to the

New York Times,

which didn't need an auction house to make people talk about it.

The article by journalist specializing in new technologies Kevin Roose,

was sold last March for more than $ 500,000 on the Foundation platform. I'm about to pick up my ether rush where I left off, when I receive a response from Piasa, an auction house known for its inventiveness and daring. It smells good. The meeting took place the next day and the Director General Frédéric Chambre was more enthusiastic than ever. He proposes to organize a physical auction - with hammer - and charity at the time of the Fiac, next October. I have a frozen smile on my face: 

20 Minutes is

about to enter the history of crypto-arts thanks to Piasa!

But the excitement is not long in being disturbed by a diffuse feeling of anguish.

I quickly understand that the sale is turning into a puzzle.

We will have to resolve questions that would not have arisen if I had sold my NFT quiet or in my corner on OpenSea, NiftyGateway, SuperRare or Foundation.

Do we have the right to sell the NFT of a digital newspaper, produced thanks to the intervention of several journalists and photo agencies, without the consent of the authors in question?

Should we develop a smart contract and deploy it on the blockchain?

If this is the case, we will need the support of a lawyer, a specialist blockchain developer.

We are taking a step forward in risk taking.

Should we panic right away or wait until tomorrow?

Find our file on NFTs

Everything would have been so much easier if I had done what I planned: tweak a little NFT and tell it all in an article.

But that would have made us look like copiers.

Numerama already made his own NFT tutorial in April.

In reality, this idea has been running through my head since March but I will not be able to prove it.

And I'm still not going to let myself be impressed by a little virtual token of nothing at all!

In the next episode, we talk about the thorny issue of copyright, one of the main puzzles of this virtual odyssey.

See you next week, dear crypto-addicts.

Culture

France is "missing the wave" of NFTs, admits the Sales Council

Culture

What if we sold a copy of "20 Minutes", transformed into an NFT, at auction with Piasa?

  • Innovation

  • Virtual currency

  • Auction

  • Future (s)

  • NFT

  • Culture