KnownOrigin

» see knownorigin.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

knownorigin's peak years overlap with the post-2020 nft mania, but i was watching that mania from the engineer side of twitter, not the buyer side. the marketplace launched out of a manchester basement on 5 april 2018, the same day coinfest was running in town. a small uk team led by andy gray, with co-founders david moore and james morgan, wanted to put rare digital art on ethereum and let the chain hold provenance the way galleries normally do.

for four years it stayed boutique. lower volume than opensea, lower hype than nifty gateway, but more credibility with the part of crypto-art twitter that disliked the apes. ebay walked in on 22 june 2022 with an undisclosed-sum acquisition and folded the manchester team into its newly-spun-up web3 division.

at that moment the deal looked like the start of something. it was the end of something instead.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the founders ran the marketplace as a curated invite-only platform where galleries were the unit of organisation. each artist had their own page. minting was on-chain ethereum and the secondary market took a cut. by mid-2022 the manchester team had raised £3.5M in seed funding and had a serious slice of the european nft-art conversation.

the ebay buy was framed as putting onchain art in front of a hundred and thirty million ebay shoppers. nobody on the ebay side ever explained how that match was supposed to work in practice.

~ how it actually ended ~

february 2024 ebay laid off thirty percent of knownorigin staff. the web3 division had been the casualty of the post-2022 nft bear market that took terra luna and ftx out with it. on 17 july 2024 the company announced that the on-chain marketplace and the minter would be shut down. cease operations was the phrasing.

tokens stayed on ethereum, which is the part of nfts that actually works. the marketplace shell was gone but the receipts remained. opensea and magic eden took the secondary trades. the knownorigin domain stopped processing new mints in late summer 2024.

~ what came after ~

nfts as a category took a lot of bad with the bad. the knownorigin model, on-chain provenance with a real curator in front of the work, was one of the cleaner ideas the cycle produced. ebay paid for it then turned the lights off without articulating what was wrong. the manchester founders moved on quietly. the basement is presumably someone else's now.

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