How a Hong Kong newspaper is remaking history with NFTs (ft. Gary Liu)

Word on the Block | Forkast.News

Highlights

• SCMP’s foray into NFTs: “ARTIFACT is our attempt to create a new standard for historical NFTs. For us, anything that is as an account of a historical moment, so new stories, or potentially a historic artifact itself, recreated or sometimes created for the very first time as a digital asset. So we do actually think that this is a very different world to the NFT world that has exploded over the course of really the last six months.”
• Preserving history on the blockchain: “One of the areas where we believe NFT can truly benefit an entire industry, actually, not even industry should across industries, is in recording history, recording historical accounts and historical assets, which together we are referring to as ARTIFACT. So our project is to set a standard, and by standard, I mean a specific smart contract with a specific metadata structure that will allow anyone eventually to be able to mint NFTs that are historical and be able to sell and trade them on a very specific market, that we are going to be building a marketplace platform that serves both the issuer world and the collectors world.”
• Blockchain brings context to history: “Any single story never lives by itself. It lives within a timeline of events. It lives within a historical context of the moment. It lives within contemporaneous analysis and insight. And it’s really, really hard to be able to showcase all of that complexity through a single news story, even in a newspaper, not to mention a single article digitally. But blockchain allows us to create that context and have that context be fully transparent, the process of how a story came to be fully transparent.”
• Time travel through a metaverse: “Sandboxes are really, really exciting new canvas. So much of understanding Hong Kong, understanding greater China requires experience. Like the scale of the Forbidden City. You can describe it in words. But until you walk into the Forbidden City for the very first time, it’s really hard for any human being to truly understand how incredibly, not only massive, but like what that moment in time would have been like when the court was filled. And Hong Kong is the same way for people who have not experienced Hong Kong…. Our hope is that The Sandbox will allow us to actually be able to tell that story properly for the first time.”