Atsur is solving African art’s provenance problem with blockchain

Art—how we create, store, buy, and distribute it—has taken different forms across several centuries. In 2020, as a rare global pandemic sent the world indoors and forced them to stay digitally connected, blockchain, an emerging technology, powered new obsessions. Among its boldest cultural experiments were non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a technology many believed would forever change how art was owned, valued, and distributed.

We saw the headlines: NFT artworks minted millionaires globally. OpenSea, launched in 2017, became the leading NFT marketplace in the US and achieved unicorn status in 2021. Soon, attention turned to Yuga Labs, the company behind “Bored Ape Yacht Club,” which helped define the aesthetics and economics of early NFT culture.

But for all the headlines NFT art attracted, it did little to address the problems that have long plagued the African art ecosystem: provenance, protection, and payment.

Adaobi Orajiaku, founder of Nigerian art-tech startup Atsur, which launched in 2024 as an NFT marketplace for physical art pieces, saw a way to use blockchain technology to archive physical African art.

“Art in Africa is centuries old, but how we manage and protect it hasn’t caught up,” she said. “Unless a Western gallery or collector discovers you, your work can disappear into history, even if it’s great.”

Worse, when we fail to preserve these prehistoric works and the oeuvre of remarkable talents, we open the door to an age-old problem: fake artworks become rampant in the market.

“Your artwork is a fake”

Today, Nigerian art arguably enjoys wider global appeal. Acclaimed 20th century artists and sculptors like Ben Enwonwu, whose bronze sculpture, Atlas, fetched over $500,000 at a Sotheby’s auction in 2021, are finally receiving the international recognition they deserve. Works by Bruce Onobrakpeya, the late Yusuf Grillo, and Peju Alatise have become staples in African modern art sales.

But with this soaring demand comes heightened risk; forgery lurks as a Trojan horse, with fake art peddlers standing to profit from the bubble.

It doesn’t help that Nigeria’s art and creative sector—which contributed between 0.2% and 2.5% annually to its gross domestic product (GDP) in the last four years since the negative all-time low (-3%) in 2020—is incredibly opaque. Provenance—the documented history of an artwork’s ownership—is often kept informally, sometimes only by memory.

In many local galleries, artworks are tracked through handwritten receipts, unverified certificates, and photos saved on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets on desktops. Forgeries can slip through easily without a standard provenance, especially when artworks are resold by auctioneers abroad. In South Africa, where the market is larger and slightly more regulated, specialists estimate forgeries are a bi-weekly occurrence. Nigeria, lacking even that level of oversight, may be worse.

This is the problem Atsur wants to solve.

“We ask artists and galleries to verify and register works with us. We issue certificates of authenticity and track ownership using blockchain,” Orajiaku explained. “That way, even if the art travels from Lagos to London, the records follow it.”

The startup is building a system where each artwork’s ownership, sale, and resale history is stored immutably on a decentralised ledger. Galleries can plug into this via Atsur’s web platform, issuing invoices, receiving payments, and embedding commission rules and royalties in smart contracts.

For artists, it means no more being cut out of future profits. For collectors, it means confidence that what they are buying is real.

Building a business from provenance

Atsur is not trying to reinvent how art is made or sold. Instead, it offers a discreet but powerful infrastructure layer beneath existing operations. It works directly with galleries, brokers, and art distributors—the players already shaping Nigeria’s art economy.

“We started as a sort of NFT marketplace for physical artworks,” Orajiaku said. “But experienced artists were already tied to galleries. And galleries said they loved our verification system but didn’t want to switch platforms or share collector data. So we pivoted to enabling them instead.”

The company operates a business-to-business (B2B) model. When a gallery or broker signs on, they can register artworks through Atsur’s platform built on the Polygon blockchain—with plans to build on Linear next—where each piece is verified. This involves a kind of Know Your Client (KYC) check for buyers and sellers, along with authenticity and provenance verification for artworks. This helps validate the identity, origin, and ownership of the piece. Once the artwork is verified, a certificate of authenticity is issued and stored on the blockchain.

From there, the platform facilitates sales by issuing invoices, converting payments into stablecoin on the backend, and distributing funds through smart contracts. These contracts automatically assign and distribute commissions to everyone with a stake in the transaction—from artists to brokers to gallery owners.

This resale infrastructure is central to Atsur’s value. When an artwork is resold, royalties and commissions are automatically enforced and tracked. This guarantees that artists and other rights-holders continue to benefit financially each time their work changes hands.

Revenue model

The company earns its revenue through these commission structures. Each transaction processed on the platform includes a fee that supports Atsur’s operations. Additional income comes from issuing certificates of authenticity, a service that individual artists or collectors can access even if they are not currently selling the work.

Transactions are backed on Polygon due to the blockchain’s low cost and high interoperability.

“A lot of our fees are mainly via commissions,” Orajiaku said. “We are enforcing resale royalties, we’re enforcing all these sales. We are enforcing tracking of the artwork such that if you wanted to resell it, you have records to resell it.”

While Atsur plans to support direct-to-collector services in the future, it initially chose the B2B route for two reasons: it offers better scale and more effectively supports provenance tracking. Second, working with galleries, the natural gatekeepers in art sales, means Atsur can onboard multiple artworks in one go and reliably document ownership transitions.

“We are building soft infrastructure,” Orajiaku said. “It may not look sexy like fintech, but it is essential.

The drag on investor interest

Atsur is still in its early stage. The company pivoted to its current B2B model in early 2025 and, according to Orajiaku, has onboarded several Nigerian galleries. Each gallery contributes dozens of artworks (between 30 and 100) to Atsur’s platform, and the startup tracks growth through a month-on-month increase in verified and processed artworks.

However, investor conversations have been cautious. Orajiaku said that the startup’s early attempts to raise capital were met with doubt.

Many investors still see it as too risky and uncertain. They point to a grim but valid concern about scale. In Africa, South Africa’s Arcual is the closest blockchain-based art-tech startup doing what Atsur is doing. Globally, the catalogue is still not impressive; Innowise, Verisart, and Switzerland’s more diversified 4ARTechnologies solve one problem or the other with physical art provenance. Yet, there’s no credible model for scaling a niche business like this.

“Everyone keeps saying [Africa’s art market] needs soft infrastructure,” Orajiaku said. “But how many people are willing to go into the bushes and clear the road for that infrastructure to happen? It’s uncharted, no one has done it before, so they can’t see the path; they price you like small chops. I say, wait until we’ve cleared the road. Then we can talk.”

Adopting niched-down art-tech platforms like Atsur’s in Nigeria requires deep trust, ease of use, and education. Orajiaku noted the difficulty in scaling the buy-in from gallery operators and arthouses. She prefers to visit gallery owners and other people at the helm every other week.

Her theory for building trust is doing the things that don’t scale. The way Atsur’s B2B model is structured means it indirectly serves the consumer side—artists and creatives who have a claim to art pieces on its platform. They benefit from each resale of their work.

Orajiaku will hit the road again in November, when Lagos’ annual art season begins. She looks forward to the season-long stretch of events, including Art X Lagos’ “Resonance,” where exhibitions and halls will be packed with art connoisseurs—and possibly investors—to pitch Atsur’s cause.

An experienced Web3 software engineer and art lover, Orajiaku hopes to connect with those who, like her, revere art and want to ensure that the workmen behind it are paid fairly for their legitimate creations.

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