Key Takeaways:
- Associated press is all set to launch an NFT photography marketplace.
- AP’s marketplace will help them monetize their photojournalism.
- The release of the initial collection will begin on 31st January 2022.
- The aim is to transform it into a community of collectors sharing similar interests in “stunning photography.”
The American non-profit news organization is taking steps to start funding their “factual, unbiased” photojournalism via ‘non-fungible tokens’ or NFT. It is building a marketplace with the help of blockchain technology provider Xooa.
The collection will include the world’s biggest stories captured by AP journalists for 175 years. It will allow collectors to purchase digitalized versions of the same include pictures that have won Pulitzer Prizes. Dwayne Desaulniers, AP director of blockchain and data licensing, said, “With Xooa’s technology, we are proud to offer these tokenized pieces to a fast-growing global audience of photography NFT collectors.”
The NFT marketplace will be a full-fledged one offering buying, trading, and selling opportunities. It will also support “secondary market transactions and purchases”, including credit card payments and crypto-wallets, including MetaMask. It has been built by minting the NFTs on Polygon, an “environment-friendly” Ethereum-tied network, and will soon support Fortmatic, Binance, and Coinbase.
AP also said that each piece of work will have varying prices, and each NFT will include “a rich set of original metadata offering collectors awareness of the time, date, location, equipment and technical settings used for the shot.”
The release of the 1st collection will begin on 31st January and will continue over several weeks. It will include images from space, war, climate, and others to spotlight specific AP photojournalists.
