The South China Morning Post launches its collection of NFTs on the Flow blockchain.
The famous newspaper which covers the Chinese and South-East Asian region is thus also entering the universe of non-fungible tokens.
ARTIFACT NFT: history according to the South China Morning Post
The collection is called ARTIFACT NFT, a release inspired by 118 years of history told by the newspaper. The NFTs will take a variety of forms: from a single news item to a newspaper cover, infographics, photos, videos, audio and more.
The purpose of these NFTs is noble: it is a way to make history immutable and decentralized.
The official website reads:
“As a news organisation with 118 years of history, SCMP believes that factual accounts of history and authentic historical assets should be immutable, and that ownership of these digitised and tokenised assets (which are part of our collective human experience) should be decentralised. Our vision is that all ‘guardians of history’ will digitise and tokenise their assets as ARTIFACTs”.
At the moment only the whitepaper of the collection has been released. The first drop will be the “1997 series”, a series of cards containing facts and episodes from 1997.
The whitepaper
Artifact will have a dedicated marketplace and will be created by experts who will assess the historical context and the most valuable facts in each collection.
The project will be governed by a non-profit foundation that also aims to involve museums, archives, universities, publishers, art galleries and other institutions.
The choice of Flow
The South China Morning Post chose Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain to release ARTIFACT. Flow’s reliability, scalability, speed and high quality are praised.
After all, Flow is a safe choice. It hosts the famous CryptoKitties, and has already been used for the NFTs of the NBA Top Shot collection.
Gary Liu, CEO of the South China Morning Post, said:
“We are delighted to join the Flow ecosystem and partner with a major global blockchain innovator in Dapper Labs. This partnership is essential for creating world-class NFT experiences of our historical archives. Through our ARTIFACT whitepaper, we look forward to inspiring other ‘guardians of history’ to share our vision of making history more discoverable, connected, and collectable”.
Mickey Maher, SVP, Partnerships, Dapper Labs added:
“SCMP’s innovative approach to transform its ledgers of historical journalism with blockchain technology has all the markings of being a game-changer. We’re proud for SCMP to launch this visionary project that reanimates meaningful historical moments and we’re excited they have chosen Flow to be the foundation of ARTIFACT’s launch protocol”.
The immutable story
This is not the first time that major magazines are tokenizing their covers. Time, for example, had already done so. Vogue Singapore has also done something similar.
However, there has been no news of initiatives like that of the SCMP. The decision to tokenize the news of the past to create a sort of immutable historical archive available to everyone is an unusual and perhaps unforeseen aspect of decentralization and crypto art.
And also perhaps one of the most useful for preserving memory.
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