The Associated Press recently announced a launch of a new NFT marketplace. According to the announcement, the new platform will allow collectors to buy tokenized photographs that the global news media outlet will offer.
The platform’s initial collection will offer NFTs of photos of a variety of subjects. Images of climate, space and even war will make an appearance, and they will be released over several weeks for varying prices. The release of the collection will start on January 31st, and the NFTs will be released on Ethereum’s layer-two scaling network, Polygon.
Users will be able to purchase the NFTs in exchange for Ethereum, but the platform will also support secondary transactions via debit and credit cards.
Details about the upcoming NFT platform
The new marketplace is being built right now by a blockchain infrastructure platform called Xooa. The platform specializes in designing white-label NFT marketplaces for IP owners and major brands. Xooa’s head of marketplaces, Zach Danker–Feldman, stated that this partnership will establish a powerful connection between the real and virtual worlds.
The platform will also support a popular crypto wallet provider, Metamask. However, there are also plans to establish further partnerships and collaborations with the likes of Binance, Coinbase, and Fortmatic. The platform also has a number of future features planned, including the ability to make withdrawals to other marketplaces, new content concepts, off-chain benefits for NFT holders, as well as adding social media capabilities.
Another thing that the platform is planning is to hold something called a “Pulitzer Drop,” which will happen on regular basis — once every two weeks. These will include Pulitzer Prize-winning photos, which are expected to be in high demand. Like the other collections, these will also be NFTs, and apart from the photos, they will also include the photographs’ metadata. Things like time, date, location, technical settings, equipment, and alike, will all be included.
The announcement also said that the platform will not only offer its own NFTs, but will also act as a platform for secondary market sales. However, it will charge a 10% fee for it.
Associated Press has a history with blockchain
Once the NFT sales are completed, Associated Press will use the funds it receives from the buyers to invest further into its journalism. The company has been around for 175 years now, acting as a non-profit news cooperative based in New York City.
While the AP’s new platform is a big step into the blockchain space, it is also not the first one that the news agency made. Last year, in October, it teamed up with Chainlink Labs to make sure that the data from its newspaper and broadcaster members would be cryptographically verified. Before that, in 2020, the news agency used EOS and Ethereum chains to publish the results of the presidential election.
Even before that, as far back as 2018, the platform partnered with a journalism firm called Civil to ensure intellectual property rights and track content usage. In other words, Associated Press has a history of collaborating with blockchain firms and projects, so the launch of its own platform is a logical next step.
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