Every object that has ever mattered – to a collector, a curator, an institution, or a market – has the same vulnerability. Its value rests on documentation that can be forged, provenance that can be fabricated, and certificates that outlive the trust of whoever issued them. Authentication has always been a human problem dressed up as a technical one.

 

Relik starts from a different premise. The object itself is the record. Not a chip embedded in it. Not a tag attached to it. Not a database entry linked to it. The physical surface – its grain, texture, and material composition at microscopic scale – is unique, immutable, and impossible to replicate. Map it once, and you have something that no fraudster can reproduce and no institution can lose: an identity that lives in the object, anchored permanently to a blockchain record that exists independently of any single organisation’s survival.

 

In this session, Martynas Kasiulis, Growth Officer at Relik, will explore what it means for cultural institutions when authentication stops being an act of faith and becomes a matter of physical fact – and what opens up, commercially, institutionally, and for the long-term stewardship of collections, when the question of “is this real?” finally has an answer that holds