China’s prominent newspaper, The South China Morning Post announced the launch of its non-fungible token [NFT] collection. The newspaper is owned by Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma; the NFT will aim to create a “standard for recording accounts of history and historical assets on the blockchain,” as noted in the project’s litepaper.
It added:
“With history tokenized as ARTIFACTs, everyone will have the opportunity to discover, collect, showcase, trade, and reanimate meaningful moments and objects from our collective human experience.”
The news organization will be creating a “standardized metadata structure” that people can use to create history and in this way, “tokenized history.” These NFTs created with the intent to preserve history and later to be discovered, connected, and showcased will be called NFTs ARTIFACTs.
Unlike other projects, it intends to be chain-agnostic to reach more people. However, it will initially use unnamed blockchains. To begin with tokenization, it will tokenize its media archive to demonstrate the application of its standard.
“In order to showcase the practical use of this metadata structure, we are also announcing ARTIFACTs by SCMP, which are collectible NFTs created from SCMP’s historical news assets”
It added that the NFT will also ensure the immutability and distributed ownership of SCMP’s “first drafts of history.” The media organization will generate revenue on primary NFT sales, royalties from secondary transactions, and fees for secondary transactions.
The SCMP was not the only news media organization to think of tokenizing history. Before SCMP, TIME Maganize created and auctioned three covers as NFTs, while CNN also sold its historic new moments as NFTs last month.
Alibaba’s interest in NFTs has suddenly surged. Apart from making NFTs available on SCMP, it will host an annual event called Taobao Maker Festival that showcases NFTs for the first time. The festival celebrates Chinese art and entrepreneurship and this time it will see decentralized application platform Near Protocol team up with blockchain gaming firm Web3Games and Chinese artist Huang Heshan to sell NFT-based real estate created by Huang.
