How we built the platform that lets thousands of buyers co-own a Picasso, share by share, with every share paid, settled and certified

WeART: Fractional Art Marketplace with Blockchain-Certified Ownership

WeART: Fractional Art Marketplace with Blockchain-Certified Ownership
WeART

WeART

WeART is a marketplace dedicated to the fractional acquisition of premium artworks in Europe and the Middle East. Its first offering opened a work by Pablo Picasso to buyers from 27 countries, at $59 per share.

Highlights

  • 5,600+ registrations and 3,900+ buyers from 27 countries
  • A transactional engine that never sells the same share twice
  • Stripe, PayPal, wallet, payouts and dividends in one ledger
  • Certificates of ownership recorded on a blockchain

Services

  • End-to-End Project Delivery
  • UX/UI Design & Optimization
  • Systems & Product Integration
  • DevOps & CI/CD Automation
  • Data Security & Compliance

Industry

  • Startups

5,600+

registrations on the platform

3,900+

buyers of shares of a single masterpiece

27

countries the buyers come from

5

languages, with translated URLs, and 3 currencies

About the client

WeART is a marketplace dedicated to the fractional acquisition of premium artworks, in Europe and the Middle East.

One masterpiece, thousands of ownersEach artwork is split into shares. The first one, a drawing by Pablo Picasso, opened at $59 per share.
Primary and secondary marketBuyers acquire shares from WeART, then resell them to other holders on a dedicated market.
Ownership you can verifyEvery purchase produces a certificate of ownership whose fingerprint is recorded on a blockchain.

The Challenge

Selling one artwork to thousands of people, one share at a time

A finite stock, an unlimited crowd

An artwork has a fixed number of shares. When many buyers check out at the same moment, the platform must never sell more shares than exist, nor block shares for buyers who never pay.

Money flowing both ways

Cards, PayPal and wallet balances on the way in. Payouts to banks, PayPal and Stripe accounts, dividends and refunds on the way out. Every movement has to be traced.

Proof of ownership

A buyer owns a share of a physical artwork held in custody. That ownership has to be documented, personal and verifiable by anyone.

International from day one

Buyers from Europe and the Middle East expect the platform in their language and their currency, with social sign-in and the payment methods they know.

Our bet:

treat every share like money in a bank

  • Lock the stock at checkout, and release it the moment a payment fails

  • Write every movement of money to a ledger that can be replayed and reconciled

  • Make ownership provable outside the platform, on a blockchain

  • Give the WeART team full control from a secure back office

The Transaction Engine

From reservation to resale, five steps that keep every share accounted for

Reserve

The shares are held for the buyer for 15 minutes, under a database lock on the artwork.

  • Row locks
  • Timed holds

Pay

Card, PayPal or wallet balance. Payment confirmations arrive as webhooks and are processed in a queue.

  • Stripe
  • PayPal
  • Wallet

Settle

Shares move to the buyer's holdings, and every euro or dollar is written to a wallet ledger.

  • Holdings
  • Ledger

Certify

A certificate of ownership is generated as a PDF, and its fingerprint is recorded on a blockchain.

  • PDF
  • QR code
  • Blockchain

Trade

Holders list their shares on the secondary market; sellers are paid out to their bank, PayPal or Stripe account.

  • Listings
  • Payouts
No share sold twiceConcurrent buyers on the same artwork are serialised, and concurrency tests guard the rule.
No payment lostAbandoned payments are detected, followed up by email and recovered or released automatically.
Every number reconciledDedicated commands reconcile secondary-market parts and repair settlements if a provider misbehaves.
A checkout built for fractions

A checkout built for fractions

Buyers choose a number of shares, or whole square centimetres of the artwork, and see the exact price immediately. The certificate can be issued in another person's name.

  • Shares reserved for 15 minutes while the buyer pays
  • Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal or wallet balance
  • Promo codes and abandoned-payment recovery emails
A primary market that sells itself

A primary market that sells itself

The home page shows the live state of the offering: shares sold and still available, registrations, countries and recent purchases.

  • Availability updated with every settled purchase
  • Price ticker of the artists on the platform
  • Waitlist and alerts for the secondary market

Key engineering decisions

The choices that make a share as safe as a bank balance.

Summing open reservations cannot stop two buyers from taking the last shares at the same time. Each checkout locks the artwork row itself, counts what is really left, then creates the reservation. Concurrency tests prove the rule under parallel load.

A reservation lasts 15 minutes. If the payment does not succeed, the shares go back on sale automatically, and the next buyer is told how long to wait, in their own language.

A purchase is settled only when Stripe or PayPal confirms it. Webhooks are recorded and processed in a queue, so a slow or repeated notification never blocks a checkout, and dedicated commands can replay or repair a settlement.

Wallet balances are never edited directly. Credits, debits, dividends, payouts, purchases and reversals are entries in a ledger, and the balance can be recalculated from it at any time.

Dedicated commands reconcile secondary-market parts, repair settlements, recover PayPal payments and release holdings. Support can fix an edge case without touching the database by hand.

Ownership, Proven

Every share comes with documents a buyer can keep and anyone can verify
A certificate recorded on a blockchain

A certificate recorded on a blockchain

After each purchase, the platform generates a personal certificate of ownership as a PDF. Its fingerprint is recorded on a blockchain, and a QR code leads to a public page where anyone can check it.

  • Certificate generated in a queue and sent by email
  • Fingerprint recorded through a managed blockchain service
  • Public verification page for each transaction
  • Prospectus, technical document, authenticity certificate and property title for each artwork
Market data for informed buyers

Market data for informed buyers

Each artist and artwork comes with market data managed in the back office: sales history, comparable sales, price history and performance indicators.

  • Artist comparison charts
  • Comparable sales and price history per artwork
  • Indicators updated by scheduled jobs
Five languages, three currencies

Five languages, three currencies

The whole platform is available in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian, with translated URLs for search engines, in US dollars, euros or pounds.

  • Server-rendered pages for speed and SEO
  • Back-office content translated automatically with AI
  • Sign-in with Google, Microsoft or Apple

Under the hood

WeART is a complete platform designed, built and operated by Satoripop, from the storefront to the infrastructure.

Every way to pay, one checkout

One checkout handles cards, digital wallets, PayPal and the WeART wallet balance.

  • Stripe Elements with card validation and 3-D Secure
  • PayPal orders, captures and webhooks
  • Refunds and cancellation reasons tracked

Money out, as carefully as money in

Sellers and holders get paid without manual transfers.

  • Wallet with a full ledger of every movement
  • Payouts to a bank, PayPal or a Stripe Connect account, with idempotent transfers
  • Dividends distributed pro rata to every holder of an artwork

A dashboard for every holder

Each member follows their shares and their money in one place.

  • Portfolio, holdings per artwork and charts
  • Purchase, sale, refund and dividend history
  • Secondary-market listings and withdrawal requests

40 screens to run the marketplace

The WeART team manages everything without a developer.

  • Artworks, artists, market data, galleries and content
  • Payments, transactions, refunds, payouts and dividends
  • Roles and permissions, two-factor authentication, activity logs and exports

Built to scale

A modern, typed stack, deployed in containers.

  • Next.js and React storefront, Laravel API with 100+ endpoints
  • Kubernetes with integration, QA and production environments
  • A Pest test suite of 450+ tests on the critical flows

The Impact

A masterpiece within reach of thousands of buyers, with the rigour of a financial platform

Thousands of buyers, zero overselling

More than 3,900 buyers from 27 countries have acquired shares of the same artwork, with every share accounted for.

Ownership anyone can verify

Every purchase produces a personal certificate whose fingerprint is recorded on a blockchain and checkable from a QR code.

Ready for an international market

Five languages, three currencies and the payment methods buyers expect, from Europe to the Middle East.

Building a marketplace where every transaction counts?

Tell us about your assets, your buyers and your payment flows. We will show you how to make them reliable at scale. Talk to our team

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