Alibaba Group Holding, a Chinese multinational e-commerce firm run by Daniel Zhang as CEO, has launched a new nonfungible tokens (NFTs) marketplace allowing trademark holders to sell tokenized licenses to their intellectual property.
Blockchain Digital Copyright and Asset-Trade is the new NFT marketplace launched by the company and it can be accessed via Alibaba’s Auction platform. NFTs launched via the platform will be issued on the “Copyright Blockchain,” a distributed ledger technology platform centrally operated by the Sichuan Blockchain Association Copyright Committee.
According to a report released today by South China Morning Post (SCMP), a news outlet owned by Alibaba, the marketplace hopes to target writers, musicians, artists, and game developers.
The marketplace is already live, hosting several NFTs that are set to be auctioned next month. Bidders must post a deposit of 500 yuan (roughly $77) to participate in auctions. Each upcoming auction has set a reserve price of $15 each. Buyers can view their collections via crypto portfolio application, Bit Universe, which is integrated into WeChat.
Giving his own view of the Alibaba NFT marketplace, SCMP reporter, Josh Ye tweeted that, “Although the technology itself does not prevent unauthorized copying, sales include complete ownership of works purchased through the platform.”
Bottomline
This is Alibaba’s biggest NFT announcement to date. However, many of the firm’s subsidiaries have already embraced nonfungible tokens. In July, an Alibaba owned e-commerce platform called Taobao, showcased NFTs for the first time in its annual Maker Festival celebrating Chinese art and entrepreneurship. The event hosted the sale of NFT-based real estate created by Chinese artist, Huang Heshan.
In the same month, SCMP launched an NFT project named ‘ARTIFACT’, which included tokenized historical moments reported by the publication from its 118- year-old archive.
Alibaba shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), are currently trading at $182.71 as of the time of writing this report. Year-to-Date (YtD), the share price is down approximately 20% with a market capitalization of $496.64 billion. On pre-market opening, the share price is down 3.14%.
