Messy Business: Enter the Broker

In late July, digital art strategist and Art Basel senior advisor and Zero10 curator Eli Scheinman wrote on X “Grateful to help World Flag (Venezuela) (2023) by John Gerrard join a very special collection this week”. The work is one of 195 generative pieces Gerrard minted on Art Blocks in 2023, in a collaboration with Pace Verso. It went to the Kanbas collection, built by Becky Kleiner and Micky Malka, who also endowed the Infinite Node Foundation for digital art. So why not simply buy it on the NFT platform OpenSea, where this market trades? Why a broker, a gallery, and a chain of transactions?

The blockchain art market was supposed to do away with the gatekeepers of the traditional art world – the gallerists, advisors, dealers – in favour of direct peer-to-peer transactions, secured on a decentralised database. It turns out that on-chain work isn’t immune to the questions that beset the rest of the trade: who owns the work? Where is it? And can it be bought?

“Decentralisation maximalists often ask why you would need a broker at all when everything is available to do it on your own. But you still want to know what price a buyer or seller will actually accept, figuring who owns the work behind a wallet, which means having a conversation. Today’s tools are not built for that conversation.” says Fred Arnal, a founder of Fellowship, the gallery on the sell side of the World Flag deal. “None of this needs technically a broker. It can all run on-chain, through a marketplace. But the information still fails to reach the parties, and until that changes you need humans.” The owner was the harder problem. “The owner was not properly identified. With the artist’s help, we researched who held the work; once we found them we could present a deal to both parties.” On-chain transactions can be anonymous: wallets encoded as strings of letters and numbers, collectors known by Twitter handle. Five years after the crypto boom and bust, collectors themselves may have forgotten what lies in their wallets.

Post on X made by Eli Scheinman on 31 December 2025. Courtesy X

The topsy-turvy digital art market

The market for digital art is in a curious place. Of the 3,100 collectors surveyed for the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting in 2025, 51% of those who bought fine art bought a digital work — the third most purchased medium after paintings (67%) and sculpture (56%). The dealer side stays small. Digital, film and video art made up 3% of dealer sales in 2025, per the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026, up from 1% in 2024 but still below the 5% peak of 2022. Only 11% of dealers sold any at all; among those that did, the medium accounted for 10% of sales by value, up from 7%. At auction, digital art stayed under 1% of value at every price level.  This means that buyers are purchasing elsewhere: through platforms such as OpenSea, directly from artists, or via brokers.

Ethereum, which is the currency many NFTs trade in, continues to be highly volatile, trading at $4830 to the dollar in August 2025 to $1917 today.

Arnal is critical of his colleagues in the traditional gallery segment: “We mostly encounter a refusal to accept the art of today from galleries. Change is hardly accepted. There are patterns repeated over and over, the same booth, artists shown every fair. I do not mind it. It is fine, and it is a business. But at some point you have to ask why commercial exposure is denied to the artists working at the forefront of what is actually happening today in our society." This is compounded by some of the larger players, such as Pace gallery, exiting the market for digital art, having failed to attract collectors in sufficient numbers.

As crypto-native artists start to be exhibited at major museums such as MoMA, the Guggenheim and Tate, and gain career traction outside the digital field, new collectors follow. “From the Tate to the Guggenheim down to the smaller ones, they’re all acknowledging it [digital art], showing it,” says Arnal. “There are many big artists we know of in terms of museum representation who don’t even have proper gallery representation. For us, that’s an opportunity.”

Increasing sales also means tracking down works. Herndon and Dryhurst, who Arnal says have several major museum shows next year, after a 2025 run in Germany, London and Venice, are the case in point. "There is a discovery problem. Artists like Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst have been releasing work since 2021, and it is very hard to find. You do not know what they made, you have no context for it, and you have no sense of the series or how the works read together. We aim to fix that.”

Holly Herndon, x | o 66, minted 2025, unique, from the series “Classified”, 2021–25. Courtesy Fellowship

Enter the broker

Part of über-gallerist Larry Gagosian’s success is matchmaking – knowing which of his ultra-wealthy clients owns a specific Rothko, and at what price they’d part with it, then making that deal happen.

“A handful of brokers are doing serious work here [in the web3 space], on research, education and identification. Eli [Scheinman] being one of them,” explains Arnal.

Eli Scheinman is a powerhouse in the digital and web3 field. His X profile regularly lists artworks he has placed or brokered into collections, and he runs the company Canon (canonart.co) – the name is itself a claim about the works it handles. Canon’s mission statement reads “Digital art is the art of our time… We exist to place it there.” Its homepage lists ten works “recently placed”, by Joe Pease, Kim Asendorf, Larva Labs, XCOPY, Tyler Hobbs, Beeple, Snowfro (Erick Calderon) and Sam Spratt — many major names in the web3 space.

He is also a senior adviser at Art Basel, curating the Miami Beach and Hong Kong editions of the fair’s digital initiative Zero 10 solo. In Basel, he shared credits with the artist Trevor Paglen, whom Fellowship represents.

Joe Pease, island, featured on Canon. Courtesy Canon

Brokering an artwork sale traditionally attracts a commission of between 5 and 10 per cent, though agreements vary. Between November 2025 and July 2026, Scheinman posted about works he had brokered or helped place into new collections around 50 times; among them CryptoPunks, XCOPY, Kim Asendorf, Larva Labs, Beeple, DEAFBEEF and John Gerrard.

Ahead of his first outing, the inaugural edition of Art Basel’s Zero 10 sector in Miami Beach, Scheinman wrote “Grateful to place Quine #12 for a new collection ATH of 35 ETH today. This is one of only 7 Pseudo-Quine.” On 7 December he reposted Yatreda’s own three-word credit: “Brokered by Eli”. Yatreda were part of the Miami Beach edition of Zero 10.

Beeple turns up once as a placement, on 13 December. “Happy to help 30K by Beeple join the collection of Batoouyoum today for 80 ETH.” Beeple showed his robotic installation Regular Animals at the inaugural Zero 10 in Miami Beach; Crypto is Bullshit sits on canonart.co’s recently placed page.

Larva Labs and the CryptoPunks turn up a lot. Larva Labs – Matt Hall and John Watkinson – are the artists behind CryptoPunks, Autoglyphs and Quine; Scheinman runs @canonpunks, a registry for CryptoPunk works, and both feature on the canonart.co recently placed roster. Art Blocks presented works by Larva Labs at Zero 10 in Miami Beach in December 2025.

Larva Labs are mentioned on 14.11.2025, then 28.01, 05.03 and 24.06.2026. CryptoPunks are mentioned on 09.12 and 28.12.2025, then 06.02, 18.02, 06.03, 17.07, 21.07 and 26.07.2026, and are part of the “recently placed” rotation on canonart.co in addition to another work by Larva Labs, Autoglyph #462.

XCOPY turns up most of all (dates 18.01, 20.01, 21.01, 26.01, 23.02, 07.03, 11.03, 18.03, 26.04 and 26.07), presented in Miami Beach by Nguyen Wahed.

Kim Asendorf was presented by Nguyen Wahed in Miami Beach and again at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026. Further Asendorf transactions are noted on 25.02, 13.03, 04.04 and 18.07. 

 Joe Pease is another: presented in Miami Beach 2025 by Nguyen Wahed, and part of the Canon roster.

Other overlaps include Tyler Hobbs, presented in Art Basel Miami Beach by SOLOS.

Michael Kozlowksi was presented by Heft Gallery in Zero10 Art Basel Miami Beach.

DEAFBEEF was presented by Asprey Studio in the Basel edition of Zero 10.

Post on X made by Eli Scheinman on 26 April 2025. Courtesy X

In total, eleven artists Scheinman said he had “helped join” collections between November 2025 and July 2026 also appeared across the three editions of Zero 10: XCOPY, Beeple, Larva Labs, Tyler Hobbs, Joe Pease, Mario Klingemann and Yatreda (Miami Beach), Kim Asendorf (Miami Beach and Hong Kong), and DEAFBEEF, William Mapan and John Gerrard (Basel).

The transactions may not have occurred at the fairs. But the artists in them gain visibility and the Art Basel imprimatur, which supports prices and, in some cases, institutional standing.

Collector-curators are standard in the web3 field that Zero 10 brought into the Art Basel fold, and Scheinman’s transactions are publicly visible on the X account his Art Basel bio openly links. What is not standard is the fair.

Asked about the arrangement, a spokesperson for the fair wrote in an emailed statement that

“Zero 10’s external curators are engaged under clear professional and ethical standards, including the requirement to disclose and avoid any actual or potential conflicts of interest. Under the terms of their agreement, external consultants are furthermore not permitted to receive improper or undue benefits in connection with Art Basel’s business activities. Curators provide independent curatorial expertise and recommendations, but do not make final selection decisions on behalf of Art Basel, which remain with our Chief Artistic Officer or, where applicable, the fair’s Selection Committee.”

Eli Scheinman was contacted for an interview, but declined.

In emerging markets, participants wear several hats. This was certainly the case in the early NFT space, where artists were collectors and also curated, or curated collections on web3 platforms such as OpenSea, fx(hash) or Art Blocks. Art Blocks is a generative art platform built on Ethereum, founded by the artist, collector and entrepreneur Erick Calderon, aka Snowfro. Calderon also runs the annual Art Blocks gathering in Marfa. So far, so unspectacular: in the absence of attention from the wider art field, self-organisation is not merely commendable but a necessity.

With maturation, however, these crossovers may turn into conflicts of interest: what reads as supporting a scene by curating its strongest positions may read as unfair advantage when played out across a global marketplace.

The blockchain art market promised disintermediation and delivered the opposite – in five years it has rebuilt every intermediary the traditional market has, and hired the same kind of people to run them. Both are true at once: the artists native to that space now have institution-spanning careers, and one of the few alternatives to the art market’s power structures has been absorbed by it. As Clare McAndrew writes in the Art Market report “the direct-selling online platforms that emerged in the last decade often simply replicated the functions of existing offline structures, creating new intermediaries rather than replacing them.”

And, cautiously, Arnal: “I would compare today’s market with where it stands in five or ten years. If there is progression, that tells you something. If there is none, it never reached the threshold of acceptance needed to become a real market. Measuring against the initial peak will always produce a negative outlook. I would dissociate the release/trading framework from the art.”