Associated Press Enters NFT World, Collectors Can Buy Historic News Agency Photos That Are Given Special Tokens

JAKARTA - The news agency, Associated Press (AP), launched a nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace where collectors can purchase tokenized photos from the global news platform.

NFT's initial collection will include photographs of subjects such as space, climate, and war from AP photojournalists. They will be released over several weeks starting January 31 at varying prices, according to the market's website and quoted by Cointelegraph.

The photos will be printed as NFT on Ethereum's layer two scaling network, Polygon. The platform will support secondary transactions using debit or credit cards, and payments in Ethereum.

The marketplace is being built by Xooa, a blockchain infrastructure platform, which specializes in building a “white label NFT marketplace for brands and IP owners.”

Head of markets at Xooa, Zach Danker-Feldman, said the partnership would serve as "a strong link between the virtual world and the real world."

Crypto wallet provider Metamask is also supported, with future collaborations with Fortmatic, Binance, and Coinbase on the card. Upcoming additional features will include “withdraws to other markets,” “social media capabilities,” “new content concepts,” and “off-chain benefits” for NFT holders.

Every two weeks, there will be a "Pulitzer Drop", which will include photos of the Pulitzer Prize winners. Each NFT will include detailed metadata of the photo such as the time, date, location, equipment and technical settings used for the photo.

According to the announcement from the AP, funds from the sale of the NFT will return to fund AP journalism. The Associated Press is a 175-year-old non-profit news cooperative based in New York City. While the platform will allow secondary market sales, it will charge a hefty 10% fee.

This is not the news agency's first foray into blockchain technology. In October 2021, The AP partnered with Chainlink Labs to ensure any data from members of US newspapers and broadcasters will be cryptographically verified.

In 2020, AP uses the Ethereum and EOS blockchains to publish the results of the presidential election. Furthermore, in 2018 they partnered with a blockchain-based civic journalism startup to facilitate its plans to track content usage and secure intellectual property rights.

AP is not the only news organization showing interest in the potential use of blockchain in the journalism industry. In June 2021, CNN launched its NFT project "Vault by CNN: Moments That Changed Us." The collection marks a series of historic "news moments" from the news company's 41-year history.