TokenBacon revolutionizes Taiwan’s art market

台灣區塊鏈新創團隊TokenBacon徹底改變台灣藝術市場

Its novel cross-blockchain cloud platform and the benefits of a hybrid cloud system are reshaping the local art market and the overall tech environment


TAIPEI (Taiwan News) -- Taiwan tech startup TokenBacon has developed the world's first-ever cross-blockchain cloud platform, allowing users to quickly build their own blockchain service.

In doing so the startup has created something novel in the cloud computing market, currently dominated by tech giants in the United States who offer private cloud services. TokenBacon offers a hybrid cloud system, which combines the merits of both the public and private cloud.

It is now revolutionizing the local art market.

The entrepreneurial Lai Chih-Hsing (來智行), founder and CEO of TokenBacon, has worked in both the U.S. and Luxembourg, and has typically founded companies aiming to solve market problems that serve the common good, and promote equality.

Startup solutions

While most of his business startup ideas are creative and useful, they have occasionally been perceived as too progressive to be accepted by external stakeholders due to conflicting interests. Even so, Lai has continued to come up with new concepts and in particular blockchain solutions, which bring transparency to humanitarian aid operations, finance, technology, and more.

In April 2018, he led a team of blockchain experts to launch the world’s first-ever cross-chain architecture, built on the decentralized cloud. The team named it – Bacon Chain. This is different to the centralized cloud market of U.S. tech giants like Amazon’s AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft’s Azure.

Then, in February 2019, the innovative cloud platform began to serve artists and people who want to own their artworks, in a more affordable way.

Cross-chain architecture is a privileged ledger in a private chain and it combines a public side chain and the API cloud. The new platform allows users to issue digital tokens and to create a multi-token wallet by entering an email address. After which, it efficiently builds its own blockchain system.

This opens the door for entrepreneurs to create and integrate token services into applications, as well as creating myriad possibilities for other applications, and at a low cost.

Tokenized artworks

TokenBacon brought blockchain to the local art market at a time when social media was changing the artist’s role in the industry.

The introduction of a completely decentralized blockchain technology to the art market improves transparency by eliminating asymmetric information, and prevents or deters ill-intentioned actors from manipulating data, since the network can spot the issue. Buyers can check transactions, as well as provenance, which is stored in the ledger, despite the absence of art brokers.

Another merit of the tokenized artworks is that they add liquidity to the item, or work of art. The lower the liquidity risk, the greater the value of the item. This should lead to a win-win situation for both young artists and people who own or partly own the works (fractional ownership).

According to Lai, one of the main challenges behind the new idea is that the blockchain-based system is not able to spot forgeries, but is able to trace back to its origins that can prevent the item from being replaced and mistakenly verified through the legitimate blockchain entries.

Crypto assets

But Lai’s ambition stretches further than just the art market. He is delving into the world of crypto assets, where users can store pictures of their own, videos, music and other types of files on a cross-blockchain cloud platform.

Users can also create a name for each of their assets at TokenSnap and earn tokens for their works, through peer-to-peer networking and without the intervention of a middleman. The company has recently launched a public beta version, though this currently only applies to photo assets.

The user-friendly platform facilitates the decentralization of industries. Furthermore, by evolving the crypto exchange landscape, TokenBacon is essentially expanding the almost unlimited potential of blockchain, making it possible for average users without coding skills to utilize blockchain.