Canon USA to Launch Ethereum Photo NFT Marketplace Cadabra

Jimmy Aki
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The United States branch of Canon, the Japanese multinational brand, has revealed “Cadabra,” a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace devoted to photography art.

The Cadabra marketplace will enable creators to flourish by connecting artists with passionate collectors who share their love for these digital art pieces.

Riding the Wave of NFTs Popularity

Canon USA recently disclosed that it would introduce an Ethereum non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace devoted to photography later this year.

Cadabra – a curated marketplace for tokenized photographs – is scheduled to launch in 2023, following a first glimpse at this week’s NFT.NYC conference.

According to a news release, the marketplace will feature pictures in various categories, including landscapes, sports, wildlife, sports-related, and many more.

The market will showcase the creations of forward-thinking artists, assisting and establishing connections between them and buyers looking to purchase photography art as digital artwork.

Cadabra will include initial distributions of photo collections and a secondary marketplace for reselling the NFTs. However, Canon has yet to disclose which photographers will use the platform.

Aside from that, the Cadabra marketplace will initially be available only in the United States; other locations will be added later.

It is no secret that some NFT markets require users to purchase specific cryptocurrencies. Canon said Cadabra would support credit and debit cards and crypto wallets.

Furthermore, the Ethereum blockchain will be used to mint digital art on Cadabra.

Interested photographers can sign up for updates on Canon’s exclusive Cadabra website as soon as they become available.

However, it is important to note that Cadabra’s NFT marketplace isn’t Canon’s first attempt at the venture.

In 2022, the company revealed that several participants in its exclusive Canon Legends program collaborated with Immutable Image to create Solana-based NFTs from a select number of their images and made them available on OpenSea under “The Legends Mint” collection.

Photographers, including Joyce Tenneson, Melvin Sokolsky, Barbara Bordnick, and Sam Abell, all contributed tokenized images to the Solana-based collection.

Aside from NFTs, Canon is also concentrating on virtual reality applications.

At CES 2023, the company unveiled Kokomo, its first VR platform application that enables live video face-to-face conversations in a virtual world.

Creatives Foray Into the NFT Venture

Unlike more popular subsectors such as profile pictures (PFPs) and generative art, the photo NFT space has been specialized, producing photographers with extremely valuable collections.

This includes Justin Aversano (“Twin Flames”) and Isaac “Drift” Wright (“Where My Vans Go?”). Quantum Art and Sloika are two further specialized photos NFT platforms.

Canon is the most recent photographic business to introduce an NFT marketplace following Meta’s revelation last year that creators will be able to coin their own “digital collectibles” on Instagram.

Last year, the parent company claimed in a blog post that Instagram users could create their own “digital collectibles,” or NFTs, to sell on and off social networking platforms.

Other creatives are expressing their entry into the NFT world in their unique ways. Last year, painter Damien Hirst joined other artists in burning 1,000 of his works in support of non-fungible tokens.

Hirst posted an Instagram photo of artwork from his “The Currency” project being burned, claiming that the pieces will continue to exist as NFTs and that the value of the original, physical pieces will be transferred to the digital goods.

However, Hirst’s flame exhibition is excessive, even among NFT-supporting artists.

Additionally, it renders the act of purchasing art; hence, its value is almost exclusively transactional.

About Jimmy Aki PRO INVESTOR

Based in the UK, Jimmy is an economic researcher with outstanding hands-on and heads-on experience in Macroeconomic finance analysis, forecasting and planning. He has honed his skills having worked cross-continental as a finance analyst, which gives him inter-cultural experience. He currently has a strong passion for regulation and macroeconomic trends as it allows him peek under the global bonnet to see how the world works.