A prestigious news site of Hong Kong origin “Initium Media” has traded its initial series of NFTs (non-fungible-tokens) containing news events that were believed by the company to have a comprehensive impact on the NFT industry because these tokens are being embraced by more and more news media, as the latest type of storytelling. Recently, while shifting its center (which was in Hong Kong previously) to Singapore, the company released its earliest NFT collection named “The Erased,” telling the happenings that occurred to the Beijing-migrant-workers who were expelled during 2017 being members of the evacuation campaign regarding the “low-end population” of the city.
It took less than a day to sell three NFTs recorded on OpenSea, and each of them was sold in return for US$1,049 (0.3 ETH). Along with presenting Beijing-mining-workers, the agency also has the intention to introduce many latest NFTs describing the events of Li Wenliang (a medical doctor), the first person who informed about the burst of coronavirus in Wuhan and afterward died due to Covid-19, and the political unrest that has put its bad effects on the unfortunate media setting of Hong Kong, as per the statement issued by it on Tuesday.
The described news outlet is not counted as being the earliest to make such grand management for launching NFTs in Hong Kong. During July, the SCMP (South-China-Morning-Post), an English newspaper aging more than 118 years, declared about issuing ARTIFACT in addition to its “litepaper,” which is an abridged form of its standard version, for a uniform metadata record to keep extracts of history in the form of NFTs which can also be traded within its marketplace.
Because of mounting political tensions regarding the earlier British colony, a few have been actively struggling to save the cultural history of Hong Kong. For example, an NFT marketplace based in Taiwan named Lootex conducted an NFT sale in July that consisted of the initial volume of a well-known manga series of Hong Kong named Buddha’s Palm being first released in the 1980s.
Some of the activists from the state also propose the concept of utilizing blockchain to safeguard the content of news media. In June, the city’s largest-circulated democracy-supporting newspaper of the city, Apple Daily, was compelled by the authorities to close its operations; thus, it shifted its content from the website to Arweave (which is a decentralized platform for data storage).
