• The NFTs, dubbed ARTIFACTs, will represent significant times and objects from Alibaba-owned SCMP Newspaper.
• The market cap for global NFTs transactions more than doubled in 2020 to $338.04 million from $141.56 million in 2019.

Alibaba, one of the world’s largest retailers and e-commerce companies, has taken interest in NFTs through the South China Morning Post (SCMP). Alibaba will issue NFTs of its tokenized media assets.

Labeled ARTIFACTs, the NFTs will represent significant times and objects from the most popular English newspaper in Hong Kong.

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.

The announcement of these assets also stated that their ownership will be 100 percent decentralized.

SCMP newspaper and NFTs market

In its ARTIFACT – litepaper, SCMP noted that it aims at tokenizing real history accounts besides other authentic historical moments. In the long, term the SCMP plans to solicit other institutions into their ARTIFACT model of NFT creation.

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 of the creation of historical NFTs.

Additionally, Alibaba intends to feature real estate NFTs at the Taobao Maker Festival. The NFTs will feature the works of Chinese artist Heshan Huang. The artist has collaborated with NEAR Protocol in addition to Web3Games to create hundreds of virtual buildings.

The Chinese e-commerce giant will feature NFTs of 10 luxury single-family villas, 300 premier units, and 1,000 parasols or ‘Umbrellas’. All these will be seen at the virtual Bu Tu Garden Community.

Growing NFT trend

Additional publications have taken an interest in NFTs with their increased global popularity. The TIME magazine, which is popular among its kind, released three NFTs of popular magazine covers back in March this year. WarnerMedia-owned CNN also ventured into the NFT space in June with its tokenized historical news coverage. These were dubbed the “Vault by CNN.”

Read More: TIME Magazine partners with Crypto.com to offer cryptocurrency payments

Notably, NFTs’ popularity has grown considerably over the years since its introduction in 2012. This year, the artist Beeple, auctioned his “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” for $69 million. Additionally, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey auctioned the very first published tweet for nearly $3 million. The March 2006 tweet reading “just setting up my twttr”, has since been shared over 120,000 times and liked over 160,000 times.

Furthermore, the market cap for global NFTs transactions has grown from $40.96 million in 2018, to $141.56 million in 2019. This figure more than doubled in 2020 to $338.04 million, according to marketplacefairness.org. By March 2021, trading volumes for NFTs totalled more than $400 million on Ethereum alone.