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Zug – 08 October 2021 – After months of undercover work, the once notorious art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi is now revealing his first and only digital artwork to the world: https://www.greats.art. Beltracchi rose to fame through his art forgeries of famous artists, including Heinrich Campendonk, Max Ernst and Fernand Léger. Now, he is entering the novel NFT space with an original art concept unlike any before. To support him on the transition from the physical to the digital art market, Beltracchi has partnered with the famed team behind the Hashmasks, the NFT project that started the NFT bull run in January 2021.
Beltracchi, the most controversial artist in the world is taking the user on an art history journey with his new NFT project. For that journey, he chose the most controversial painting in the world: the “Salvator Mundi”, allegedly created by Leonardo da Vinci. There has been significant controversy around this painting ever since it was sold as the most expensive painting in the world for $450.3 million at Christie’s in 2017. Beltracchi is recreating the “Salvator Mundi” in the style of various old masters from different eras in time, including artistic movements like the high renaissance, surrealism, cubism, pop art, and more.
On 8th October 2021, Beltracchi released “The Greats,” a collection of 4,608 NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain that are available through his webpage: https://www.greats.art. The sale beings on Monday, 18 October 2021 08:00 PM CEST.
The release of Beltracchi’s NFT collection is happening at a crucial point in time, where art is transitioning from the physical to the digital world and leveraging decentralized technology to increase access to fine artwork and an otherwise censored artist.
“The NFT market offers artists a platform to market themselves independently and makes them independent from traditional art market mechanisms,” says Beltracchi.
When it comes to digital art, it is not only the image that is important, but everything that surrounds it: the execution, the software behind it, the community, and so on. “The Greats” is at the forefront of artistic innovation as it integrates with other modern-day blockchain applications to accurately represent and highlight the current state of NFT technology.
“The Greats” uses the industry-leading open-source oracle network Chainlink to access a verifiably tamper-proof source of randomness through its Chainlink VRF service. The sale will leverage Chainlink VRF to help ensure that all NFTs are distributed to users in a 100% randomized manner. Not only will this help prevent any malicious player from circumventing the sale’s integrity, but everyone can verify through cryptography that the process was indeed fair and unbiased.
In addition to Chainlink, “The Greats” uses The Graph as its data indexing layer. By deploying a dedicated subgraph for the project, beautiful data visualizations, sales statistics and instant data querying is made available in real time.
The NFT industry has grown from a small community of early adopters in Discord and on Twitter to a global phenomenon supported by many celebrities including the likes of Shaq, Snoop Dogg and Mike Tyson in 2021.
