ConsenSys, HENI Group, and Heyday Films launched Palm NFT Studio on March 30, 2021. It’s described as an “innovation” lab that’s been set up to “collaborate with artists, marketplaces, and rights holders to bring projects and platforms into the Palm ecosystem.”
As mentioned in a release:
“Palm is a joint venture between the brightest minds in blockchain working with two of the most accomplished teams in fine art and filmmaking, brought together by ConsenSys founder and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin; film producer and owner of Heyday Films, David Heyman; and founder of world class art house HENI Group, Joe Hage. The new venture will be led by co-founder and CEO Dan Heyman, currently General Manager of protocols at ConsenSys.”
As noted in the announcement, the first artist drop using Palm is Damien Hirst’s The Currency Project. An initiative that’s reportedly five years in the making, The Currency initiative aims to “challenge the concept of value through money and art,” according to Hirst. It consists of 10,000 works on paper that are linked or associated with non-fungible tokens or NFTs.
According to Damien Hirst, Palm is “by far the best platform for me.” Hirst added that it’s new and “art focused” and that it’s “the most environmentally friendly, and it is quicker and cheaper to use.” He claims that with Palm, artists “can invent the future.”
As confirmed in the update, as well as being the first initiative from Hirst, today Palm is also announcing its launch partners from the cryptocurrency industry who are committed to supporting The Currency Project and other “future drops” on Palm.
They include decentralized finance (DeFi) trading protocol Uniswap, which will “deploy a version of the Uniswap v3 protocol to support trading of art assets within the Palm ecosystem,” the release confirmed. It also mentioned that $MEME, the “popular experimental NFT project”, Nifty’s, a new NFT-oriented social media site, and Protocol Labs for “permanent decentralized storage of NFT metadata on IPFS” are all part of this initiative.
As stated in the release:
“The Palm sidechain will be accessible via a custom network on MetaMask, the most popular Ethereum wallet, currently serving over 3 million MAUs, with infrastructure operated by Infura, the leading Ethereum and IPFS API service.”
Recently, NFTs have been gaining a lot of popularity with artists and creators for their “transformative role in ownership, commerce, and how creators connect directly with buyers, fans, and collectors,” the announcement noted.
The Palm ecosystem is “designed from the ground up to provide artists and creators an optimized experience today, including low gas costs, fast transaction finality, and 99% more energy efficiency,” the release added. It also mentioned that at launch, Palm will be an Ethereum sidechain that’s interoperable with the main Ethereum blockchain network.
The initiative aims to gradually transition to Layer 2 solutions while “making the transition as seamless as possible so that artists can stay focused on creativity,” the announcement confirmed.
David Heyman stated:
“I’m thrilled to partner with Joe, Dan, Joseph and the teams at ConsenSys and Heni on this venture. NFTs have extraordinary implications for how stories can be told, how art can be made and how creative projects can be financed, not to mention the range of new ways fans can engage with them. Creators can now connect directly with their audience, unfettered and independently. Rights holders can monetize and market their libraries with no intermediaries. Through Palm NFT Studio, we’re eager to partner, build and experiment with artists, platforms and IP owners to demonstrate what this new format makes possible, and help create a fresh, exciting new ecosystem for content creators.”
Joseph Lubin, Founder at ConsenSys, remarked:
“While Ethereum 2.0 transitions to Proof of Stake, artists and creatives that want to issue NFTs can now use a new sidechain built with Hyperledger Besu. Our Protocols teams have been developing various scaling solutions for years for enterprises and central banks, which use a Proof of Authority consensus mechanism. With Palm, ConsenSys will initially work with the joint venture as node operators, while still allowing for the trustless transfer of tokens to the Ethereum mainnet with a Hash Time-Lock Contract (HTLC) bridge, and progressively decentralize node operators initially serviced by Infura and Palm NFT Studios.”
Dan Heyman, CEO at Palm NFT Studio, said that they’ve just started to scratch the surface of what these so-called NFTs mean for their creators. He added that it’s really great to be teaming up with Hirst on The Currency Project, which “really demonstrates what NFTs can do.”
He added:
“Our hope is that by developing marquee projects such as this with iconic artists, creatives and catalogs, while onboarding platforms, curators and fans to Palm, we can empower everyone in the business of creativity to bring their most imaginative works to life, access audiences directly, and transform the creative industries in a way that is scalable, equitable and efficient.”