Bluethumb Digital is a curated NFT fine art platform from one of the most established online art marketplaces, Bluethumb. In our traditional art offering, we represent 17,000 artists and have a community of 300,000 art collectors here in Australia – as well as physical galleries in Adelaide and Melbourne.

“For years we’ve wanted to add digital art to Bluethumb,” says co-founder George Hartley. “Some of the most interesting new art in the last few years has been in digital and video and we actually have hundreds of artists already on Bluethumb who do some digital work. The problem is we haven’t been able to work out how to sell it and now NFTs have solved that for us…"

Read more about what inspired Bluethumb Digital here.

NFTs or non-fungible tokens are things used to symbolise the possession of unique items. In art world terminology you can think of them a bit like a certificate of authenticity that serves as provenance and proof of ownership. Unique – or non-fungible – refers to assets which have distinctive characteristics, and therefore do not have equivalent substitutes.

We’re a pioneer of online art and we’ve grown to be the largest art marketplace here by building for artists to be successful in their careers over the long term. We grow when artists grow – and we’re going to do that for digital artists here in Australia. Most of our 100K+ art collectors don’t yet collect NFTs, but want to. We’re going to make it accessible for them to start collecting too with awesome curated drops and plan to reduce any initial friction through education and by providing easier payment options as well as MetaMask/WalletConnect etc. We bring a trusted 10 year old brand into the space, so we can hopefully build on that trust in the digital space.

Yes. Bluethumb Digital is an exclusive and curated platform for Australian artists. Each of our drops has a theme that links all of the artworks in that collection. For example, our inaugural Genesis Drop encouraged artists to get creative with locally-inspired themes and motifs to appeal to the Australian audience.

To apply to be a part of our future collections, you can express your interest through our website's sign up form. We will assess your suitability for upcoming drops based on the information you provide, so please make sure that you fill in all the fields! If we think you’d be a good fit for one of our curations, we’ll reach out to you on the social accounts provided. Please note as we're currently in the early stages of Bluethumb Digital, we are only bringing on a small number of artists with each collection. We are unable to respond to everyone who submits with individual feedback.

We’re currently looking for artists residing or based in Australia. We’re open to accept submissions from traditional artists looking to go digital, although photographs of traditional artworks will not be accepted as NFTs. If you have a special idea for a drop or collaboration, feel free to let us know!

Our commission is 15%, with a 10% royalty fee (split into 7.5% artist royalty on resale, and 2.5% royalty for Bluethumb Digital for secondary trades) for all drops except Genesis on OpenSea. The fees we charge are pretty standard and the same as SuperRare for example. 15% is higher than some platforms such as Nifty Gateway. However, we are also curating an exclusive, limited-edition drop to a large collector base – we have around 300,000 active users each month, about the same as OpenSea – and we also provide extensive marketing support for the small number of NFT artists working with us.

By using smart contracts we defer the cost of minting an NFT and the actual minting until the moment it's sold to its first buyer. The gas fees for minting are rolled into the same transaction that assigns the NFT to the buyer, so you the NFT creator never has to pay to mint. Instead, a portion of the purchase price simply goes to cover the additional gas needed to create the initial NFT record.

We currently support Metamask, Wallet Connect, Portis, Torus, Fortmatic and Bitski. Due to a current limitation with marketplaces, only 1 wallet address can collect royalties. Resale royalties can only be collected and distributed by Bluethumb when art is sold on the secondary trading platform OpenSea. Bluethumb will pay out artists their royalty share in ETH monthly. Everything is transparent and verifiable on the Ethereum blockchain.

Ethereum. Minimum artwork sale price is 0.1 ETH.

In short: all artists retain the copyright for their works. Once a collector buys an artwork it will be viewable in their wallet and its ownership is verified on the blockchain. However, as with most art purchases, artists retain their copyright unless otherwise agreed. Visit our T&Cs for more info on copyright more generally.

Exclusivity contracts or agreements won't be issued. However, we ask artists who sign up with us to agree to a list of terms and conditions as per our usual user agreement here. There will be a few exceptions though such as the commission structure which we will make clear in these FAQs and other comms. As we are doing exclusive, one-off drops, we ask that selected artworks are exclusive to our site for a period of four weeks from the drop, after which they can be sold elsewhere.

Listed at a price. Minimum artwork sale price is 0.1 ETH. Sale prices should also be rounded to the first decimal place (e.g. 0.1, 0.2 ETH etc. as opposed to 0.13, 0.24 ETH).

We have a 10-year strong community of artists and buyers of around 300,000, who we have been marketing extensively to ever since our first collection, the Genesis Drop. What we’re aiming for is to establish Bluethumb Digital as the home of digital artists here in Australia. There’s building excitement in our art community about this already, and we’ve curated an amazing collection and pushed promotions via press coverage and a mix of social and newsletter campaigns.

Currently our main Bluethumb newsletter has over 150,000 subscribers, and our follower count on Facebook and Instagram is close to 70,000 and 80,000 respectively. We’ve also been featured in major news outlets such as the Guardian for other major launches and initiatives, including our Indigenous Art Centre Platform, our Art Prize Platform and our Secondary Art Market Platform.

We're also building a community specifically for NFT art enthusiasts on Bluethumb Digital's own social accounts.

Any art in digital form can be submitted. We're only accepting one offs / unique editions. However, simply taking photos of traditional artworks won't be included (e.g. a photo of a painting with no additional digital elements).

Accepted file formats: JPG, PNG, GIF, SVG, MP4, WEBM, MP3, WAV, OGG, GLB, GLTF.

The maximum file size supported is 100MB, but we recommend keeping it under 40MB for faster load times.

We require a minimum of 300 dots per inch (dpi) for submitted works. We recommend that the resolution for each submitted artwork is at least 5000 x 5000 pixels.

Yes we are, and this is very important to us. In the immediate term, we are committed to reducing the impact of Ethereum’s carbon emissions by using carbon offsets to make the platform carbon neutral at launch. Plus we're exploring networks with lower carbon footprints and other more sustainable long term plans.

We have a lot of exciting ideas in the works. Our next drop will showcase women in NFTs, and we intend to follow that with drops highlighting Indigenous art, and individual artist showcases throughout the course of the year.

Keep an eye on our social channels for the latest news!

The Genesis Drop is our first, and most important, collection, as any Genesis artwork held will give the owner priority access to future collector pieces in Bluethumb Digital drops, plus other benefits across Bluethumb’s physical and digital offerings. As such, we expect these works to be highly sought after and collectable in the future.

Presale for addresses registered in the whitelist started on Thursday 24th February 2022, 7 p.m. AEDT.

Anyone with an ETH address and paying in crypto (ETH) has been able to purchase from Friday 25th February, 7 p.m., whereas credit card options are subject to further development (all timings follow AEDT).

The Genesis Drop artworks will remain on sale until all are sold. We will continue to support and promote the Genesis Drop alongside any future drops. These future collections may or may not be available for limited windows only, so please check their availability as the details for each drop are announced.