Despite the regulatory crackdown, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is making a move into the NFT market. Alibaba-owned most popular English newspaper in Hong Kong – South China Morning Post (SMCP) – will issue its own NFTs tokenizing its media assets.
Dubbed as ARTIFACTs, these NFTs will represent meaningful moments and objects from SCMP’s historical news assets. The announcement notes that the ownership of these tokenized assets will be completely decentralized. It further adds:
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) make it possible to achieve both objectives, and SCMP aims to create a standardized metadata structure that anyone can use to tokenize history as NFTs, thus providing the foundation on which history can be discovered, connected, and collected in a meaningful way. We are calling these NFTs ARTIFACTs.
However, SCMP is not the first new publication to adopt the NFT route. Earlier in March 2021, the popular TIME magazine released three popular magazine covers in the form of NFTs.
In its official litepaper, SCMP notes that its goal is to tokenize factual accounts of history and other authentic historical assets in the form of ARTIFACTs. The announcement adds:
In the immediate term, we plan to create ARTIFACTs from SCMP’s historical archives using the standardized metadata structure. Our objective is to build the first use case of this standard and to lay the foundation for a rich ARTIFACT ecosystem. In the long run, we will invite other institutions (including media publishers, museums, academic institutions, etc.) to adopt the ARTIFACT standard for the creation of historical NFTs.
Alibaba to Feature NFTs at the Taobao Maker Festival
In another move, the Chinese e-commerce giant will feature real estate NFTs at the Taobao Maker Festival. These NFTs will feature works from Chinese artist Heshan Huang. The artist has collaborated with NEAR Protocol and Web3Games to create hundreds of virtual buildings.
The Alibaba Taobao Maker Festival will feature NFTs for 10 luxury single-family villas, 300 high-end units, and 1,000 ‘Umbrellas’—parasols—within the virtual Bu Tu Garden Community.
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