The winds of change are also blowing across the media landscape. The French newspaper 20 Minutes , has sold its own non-tangible token (NFT) in a charity auction last November.
The sale of this six-page supplement titled The Mad Years 2020 was organized by the Piasa art gallery in Paris. The lucky buyer won the bid for 3,000 euros . The copy has a signed and sealed guarantee that makes it unique thanks to a certificate of ownership based on blockchain technology, a tamper-proof system that authenticates both virtual currency transactions and sales of digital objects.
A free daily newspaper on the cryptocurrency market
20 Minutes is a general news daily, created in 2002 and distributed in French cities free of charge. On January 13, 2020, something unprecedented happened, since the newspaper began to publish information about the possible damage that the still distant coronavirus could cause, just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit France and all of Europe. The issue that appeared published that day was later highlighted by editors and Internet users for its prophetic nature, as it anticipated with surgical precision what was to come on the continent.
NFTs have seen their value rise throughout this year on foreign auction houses. NFTs allow the acquisition of any digital object (tweets, photos, gifs, animations, videos, source code …) thanks to a token, which materializes this object and proves its authenticity as well as avoiding possible counterfeits. In search of emerging phenomena, 20 Minutes wanted to document this technological revolution by trying to sell its own NFT.
“Through this sale, the newspaper wants to question the value of quality information,” said a spokesman for the newspaper. “20 Minutes is a free newspaper for its readers, but getting information comes at a price […] We found that the sale of an NFT seems to be a great way to reflect on this question as we see a lot of crypto arts (artistic NFTs) that are intelligible to most people, and yet they sell for thousands of euros at auctions. “
The French newspaper was inspired by The New York Times , which decided to sell a column image as NFT and sold it for $ 560,000 last March . On the Internet, NFTs are easily exchanged through specialized platforms such as OpenSea or Rarible. However, in France, the digital representation of a work, an intangible personal property, cannot be part of a voluntary sale by public auction.
To circumvent the ban on auctioning intangible personal property, 20 Minutes has sold, in addition to the NFT, an offset printing plate showing four pages of the supplement. The proceeds from the sale will go to the Security Fund of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), an international organization that helps journalists with more difficulties.
