Artifact Labs, a Web3 company specializing in utilizing blockchain technology to preserve records of historical events, has announced the successful closure of a $3.25 million funding round.
Blue Pool Capital, a fund that mainly invests the wealth of Alibaba founders Jack Ma and Joe Tsai, took the lead in the funding round, with participation from Animoca Ventures.
In its release, Artifact Labs stated that it intends to use the funds to grow the business, particularly by hiring more developers.
“It’s not about creating new IPs for speculation – for example NFT hype projects – it’s about driving new engagement with historically significant collections by using Web3,” Phillip Pon, CEO of Artifact Labs, said in a release. “We want to carve new space in the younger public’s consciousness for historical brands and artifacts…while supporting these important organizations with new revenue streams to fund their preservation work, we are also solidifying immutable on-chain data preservation through NFTs.”
In 2021, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) launched ARTIFACT, a non-fungible token (NFT) standard, after having incubated Artifact Labs initially. This standard was created for recording historical data.
During 2021 and 2022, the newspaper was actively involved in the sale of NFTs featuring its significant front pages from the past, such as the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the outbreak of Avian flu, the Asian Financial Crisis, and the demise of Princess Diana in the U.K.
In a statement, Artifact Labs announced that they will be introducing Non-Fungible Token (NFT) collections as a source of revenue for preservation organizations, while also developing and deploying technology to assist institutions in securing their archives on the blockchain.
