Terms of Service

Trace is a marketplace and social platform where people make, show, collect and curate art. It is operated by Trace Studio 22 LLC. These terms are the agreement between you and Trace Studio 22 LLC, and by creating an account you accept them.

You must be at least 18 to sell work or handle payments, and at least 16 to hold an account at all. If you are using Trace on behalf of a business, you confirm you are authorised to accept these terms for it.

Trace Studio 22 LLC is registered in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Georgian law governs this agreement. Nothing here removes rights you have under the consumer law of your own country, which continues to apply to you regardless.

[TO CONFIRM: the registered address, and whether disputes should go to the Georgian courts or to arbitration — worth deciding deliberately, since suing in Tbilisi is impractical for most international users and an unusable dispute clause can be struck down as unfair.]

One account gives you everything Trace does. There are no separate artist, collector or visitor accounts, and no capability is locked behind a role — you can publish work, buy work and curate collections from the same profile without asking anyone.

You are responsible for keeping your password secure and for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access to it.

You may close your account at any time. Closing it removes your profile from public view; see the Privacy Policy for what happens to the underlying records.

You keep every right you already had in the work you upload. Trace claims no ownership of your art, your writing, or anything else you post.

To actually run the service, you give us a limited licence to store your content and display it to the people you have chosen to show it to — on your profile, in feeds, in the communities and exhibitions you post to, and in previews and thumbnails of those. That licence covers nothing else.

Specifically, this licence does not let us:

• —sell, sublicense or syndicate your work to third parties
• —use your work in advertising for Trace without asking you first
• —train machine-learning models on your work
• —keep displaying your work after you delete it, beyond the short window it takes to clear caches and backups

You are responsible for having the rights to what you post. Do not upload work that is not yours to upload.

Anyone can list work. Before your first listing goes live, our curation team reviews the details you provide about your practice — this is a check that you are who you say you are and that the work is yours, not a judgement of artistic merit.

When you list a piece for sale you are making a binding offer. If someone buys it, you agree to:

• —provide a certificate of authenticity where the work calls for one
• —package and ship the work within the timeframe stated on the listing
• —describe condition, dimensions, medium and edition accurately
• —honour the price shown at the time of purchase

Payment is held until the buyer confirms receipt or the confirmation window closes, whichever comes first. If a work arrives damaged, materially different from its description, or not at all, the buyer may open a dispute and we may reverse the payment.

Joining, listing, posting and every feature on the platform are free. Buyers are never charged a fee. Trace earns a commission only when a work actually sells, and only from the seller: 10% on Open, 7% on Studio ($9/month).

Reselling a work you did not make is charged less — 5% on Open, 4% on Studio — because a reseller also pays the artist's share described in the next section. We would rather take a smaller cut and keep the sale, and the work's record, on the platform.

Commission is calculated on the sale price and deducted before payout. Payment processing fees charged by our payment provider are included in that commission — you are not billed separately for them. Open requires no subscription at any point.

A paid tier lowers your commission rate and changes nothing else. It buys no features, no listing capacity, no placement and no priority. You can start, change or cancel a subscription at any time; cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and we do not charge cancellation fees.

If we ever change these rates, we will tell you at least 30 days beforehand, and the new rate will only apply to sales made after it takes effect.

Every artwork on Trace keeps a record of who made it, who has owned it, and where it has been shown. When a piece is resold here, 5% of the new price goes to the artist who made it.

That share is paid out of the seller's proceeds, not added to what the buyer pays. It applies to every resale on the platform, worldwide, for as long as the work keeps changing hands — not only where local law requires it.

Resales below $100 are exempt. There is no upper limit: the share scales with the work.

By listing a work for resale on Trace you agree to this deduction. It is shown on the piece's page before you buy, so no one is surprised by it later. Where your country grants artists a resale right of its own, that right still applies and is not replaced by this one.

Guess Lists, rankings, recommendations and every other way Trace surfaces people and work are calculated from genuine activity and reputation. They are never influenced by what you pay us.

Trace does not sell placement, promotion, boosting, sponsored posts or advertising of any kind, on any tier. There is no paid way to appear higher, more often, or in front of more people.

We treat attempts to manipulate these signals — fake accounts, coordinated engagement, bought followers, self-dealing sales to inflate a record — as serious violations, and we will remove accounts for them.

Do not use Trace to harass, threaten or impersonate anyone; to post work you do not have the rights to; to sell counterfeits or misrepresent what you are selling; to scrape the platform; or to break the law.

Anyone can report a post, a listing or an account. We read reports and act on them — that feedback is a large part of how moderation here works, so please use it.

Where we can, we prefer to explain a problem and give you a chance to fix it. For serious or repeated violations we may remove content, restrict selling, or close an account. If we close your account you can appeal, and any money already owed to you will still be paid.

Trace connects buyers and sellers. Except where we hold payment in escrow, the sale contract is between the two of them — we are not the seller of the work and cannot guarantee any listing.

We work to keep the platform running but cannot promise it will never be unavailable or lose data. Where the law allows us to limit our liability, we do; where it does not — including your statutory rights as a consumer in your own country — nothing here takes those rights away.

[TO CONFIRM: the liability cap. A conventional choice is the greater of the fees you paid us in the last 12 months or a fixed floor amount, but it should be set with a lawyer.]

We may update these terms. For anything that materially affects you — fees, rights in your content, dispute handling — we will give you at least 30 days notice by email and on the platform before it takes effect. Continuing to use Trace after that means you accept the new version.

[TO CONFIRM: a contact address for legal notices.]