MILAN – ‘Aesthetes,’ an Italian startup that develops NFTs based on physical artworks, is approaching the international market, announced the developers. It is the first startup to create a link between the world of physical art and blockchain.

 The company has risen to meet the challenge of tearing down the conceptual, economic and logistical barriers that have made the art market, until now, an exclusive niche and a market accessible only to a few.

 Aesthetes aims to innovate and make the market more democratic. The new product will be a connection between physical and digital art - introducing the Phygital NFT.

 A Phygital NFT connects simultaneously to a digital artwork and a physical one. The buyer of the NFT will be 100 percent the owner of the digital artwork and at the same time, they will have the ownership of a share of the related physical artwork managed by Aesthetes, who will take on the role of the curator.

  The creation and sale of the NFT version of physical artworks will foster a transparent and democratic art market and it will guarantee – simultaneously – safe and fast transactions. In contrast to the main NFT platforms, which have been developed on the Ethereum blockchain, Aesthetes employs the XRP Ledger blockchain that allows you to mint and transfer NFTs at a reduced cost and with a very low environmental impact.

 “We are working on the creation of a marketplace that will offer collectors NFTs related to different types of works, in order to reach as much of the market as possible. In 2021 alone, global sales of NFTs were worth around dlrs 22 billion and we believe that this positive trend will not end soon, considering that the collectors’ average age is less than 40 years,” explains Luca Bertolani, co-founder of Aesthetes.

 Claudia Cimaglia, also a company co-founder, said, “With Aesthetes, we want to break the concept of elitist access to art in order to make it in its real, digital or Phygital version a heritage for most people. Important technology partners and art galleries believe in our values and we are working with them to create the first big dedicated event in autumn.”

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