South China Morning Post to Mint Historical Records as NFTs

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) has launched a non-fungible token (NFT) standard for recording historical records on the blockchain.

• The newspaper introduced "ARTIFACT," a standardized model for recording accounts of history and historical assets on the blockchain as NFTs.
• The paper, bought by Alibaba in 2016, will start with a collection of NFTs minted from historical moments drawn from the archive of its 118-year history.
• The venture will harness "a few selected blockchains" the SCMP has yet to identify. The plan is for ARTIFACT to eventually be chain-agnostic.
• While NFTs representing historical events have attained widespread popularity, these have been mainly for collectible purposes and often draw from the entertainment world, such as sport or music.
• Minting records of historical interest in the form of newspaper articles could represent a compelling use case for blockchain technology.
• "The Post 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," the announcement said.