SCMP aims to turn its 118-year-old media assets into NFTs

The project roadmap includes plans for a decentralized authentication process that will eventually allow for anyone to tokenize assets using the ‘Artifact’’ standard.

“The South China Morning Post is committed to engaging and educating a global audience with information and technology,” said Gary Liu, the chief executive officer of SCMP.

“Blockchain offers immense potential to immutably preserve journalism that witnesses and explains history. The ‘Artifact’’ project is an opportunity to discover, collect, showcase, trade, and reanimate meaningful moments and objects from our collective human experience and we are excited to introduce this standard to the world.”

What is ‘Artifact’?

• SCMP aims to create a standardized metadata structure that anyone can use to tokenize history as NFTs, which will be called ‘Artifacts’. This allows history to be discovered, connected and collected in a meaningful way.

• SCMP plans to showcase the use of this standard with an NFT collection drawn from the organization’s historical archives under the name ‘Artifacts by SCMP’.

• By tokenizing key moments from SCMP’s 118-year-old collection of media assets, it aims to take the first steps towards creating greater value from the news organization’s “first drafts of history”.

• Future plans include SCMP working towards inviting other partners to tokenize accounts of history and historical assets as ‘Artifacts’.

• SCMP will also explore how best to serve a community of collectors via an ‘Artifacts’’ platform and marketplace, along with the creation of a Decentralized Autonomous Organisation (DAO) to decentralize long-term project governance.