Despite the regulatory crackdown, Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce powerhouse, is entering the NFT industry, it earlier revealed its Taobao Maker festival will feature NFTs.
The South China Morning Post (SMCP), Hong Kong’s most popular English daily, will issue its own NFTs to tokenize its media assets, according to Alibaba.
These NFTs, dubbed ARTIFACTs, will reflect significant moments and objects from SCMP’s historical news assets. The ownership of these tokenized assets will be totally decentralized, according to the release. It goes on to say:
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.
SCMP, on the other hand, isn’t the only new publisher to go the NFT path. TIME magazine produced three popular magazine covers in the form of NFTs earlier in March 2021.
SCMP states in its official whitepaper that its purpose is to tokenize historical accounts and other authentic historical assets as ARTIFACTs. The following is included in the announcement:
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.
The Chinese e-commerce behemoth will also showcase real estate NFTs during the Taobao Maker Festival. Heshan Huang, a Chinese artist, will be featured in these NFTs.
Hundreds of virtual buildings were created in collaboration with the artist, NEAR Protocol, and Web3Games.
Within the virtual Bu Tu Garden Community, NFTs for 10 premium single-family villas, 300 high-end units, and 1,000 ‘Umbrellas’—parasols—will be available at the Alibaba Taobao Maker Festival.
