Fintech
OKX announces that it is a key sponsor of Abu Dhabi Finance Week

OKX, the world-leading cryptocurrency exchange, is proud to announce that it is a Support Partner of Abu Dhabi Finance Week.
Taking place from November 14 to November 18 at the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) the international financial centre of the UAE’s capital, Abu Dhabi Finance Week is one of the world’s premier financial gatherings, bringing together industry leaders, financial institutions, investors, and regulators from all over the globe. During this gathering, the discussions will be exploring the intersection between finance and technology, as well as fintech issues such the role of regulators in responding to innovation, the effect of the metaverse on fintech companies, and artificial intelligence in fintech.
Haider Rafique, Chief Marketing Officer, OKX, said, “The United Arab Emirates is a world leader in nurturing and harnessing the enormous economic power that fintech provides. They have been excellent partners in our mission to build an innovative and responsible cryptocurrency exchange. We are proud to be a Support Partner for this gathering of fintech luminaries in the Emirates, and we are looking forward to seeing what food for thought these brilliant minds will provide to fintech stakeholders worldwide.”
In addition to OKX’s sponsorship of Abu Dhabi Finance Week, Haider will take part in a panel discussion at the event with Zak Brown, the CEO of OKX’s partner McLaren Racing. Hadley Gamble will serve as moderator, and the panelists will discuss the impact that Web3 and crypto is having on the global sports business.
As part of OKX’s goal to build the world’s most beloved crypto brand, the company will continue to sponsor and participate in important fintech gatherings and events throughout the globe that will help deepen its relationships with a broad range of users and industry contributors.
For more information on OKX, please visit OKX.com.
To find out more on Abu Dhabi Finance Week, check out www.adgm.com.
Blockchain
ShopNEXT partners with Visa to launch the first-ever Web3 Loyalty Platform

ShopNEXT has partnered with Visa to launch the first-ever Web3 Loyalty Platform. Any user with a Visa card can not only shop conveniently, but also can earn token rewards. This ingenious loyalty platform is expected to help millions of merchants grow businesses and contribute to rapidly stimulating the global economy as well as bring Web3 to the masses.
How does it work?
ShopNEXT utilizes the card-linked feature of the Visa Offers Platform that allows any user to link a Visa card to their mobile app. Through VisaNet, ShopNEXT will be able to track all successful card payment transactions and reward users with the token on top of them, instantly. ShopNEXT token is a kind of loyalty point but the difference is that it is developed on blockchain.
Moreover, ShopNEXT also introduces in-app gameplay and NFT cards, which give users options to boost their earning rewards. Shopping, gamification, and NFT will create an innovative Shop-To-Earn model.
How can it be a sustainable model?
Unlike other models like Play-To-Earn or Move-To-Earn, Shop-To-Earn is much more sustainable because it contributes real value to the economy by building a win-win collaboration with all parties involved. Users are encouraged to shop more to earn more token rewards, which helps merchants grow their businesses.
To strengthen the model’s uniqueness, ShopNEXT defined a new term called External Profit Reserve (EPR). 100% of the profit from merchants and card issuers’ sales commission will be sent to the EPR to back all the tokens issued on the market. This is to make sure every token has an intrinsic value that is generated by users through their shopping.
Mr. Linh Le, ShopNEXT CEO, shared his view on the collaboration with Visa: “We want to leverage the beauty of Web3 to create an appealing Loyalty platform. In the situation that the global economy is struggling to grow due to COVID-19, our mission is to help merchants grow their businesses by motivating everyone to shop and earn token rewards, which contributes to rapidly stimulating the world economy. From there, we also provide the easiest and safest gateway for everyone to start their Web3 journey with the Shop-To-Earn model. This collaboration with Visa will help us accelerate the process of acquiring merchants and users efficiently.”
Ms. Dung Dang, Visa Country Manager of Vietnam and Laos, said: “Visa is excited about this new collaboration with ShopNEXT that is pushing out the horizon of digital shopping. More consumers now shop online than ever before and they are showing great appetite for new digital experiences like token reward based on blockchain technology and NFTs. Our partnership will help consumers shop without worries while enjoying the speed and security of Visa payments and earn exciting novelties like NFTs.”
As a veteran in the affiliate-based business area for many years, ShopNEXT understands the pain point of reconciliation time and believes this new card-linked feature will solve this problem completely by offering instant rewards. NFT gamification has already proven its success in user acquisition, both traditional and digital. Combining daily spending activities with NFT gameplay is expected to create a new trend in the Web3 space.
Web3 has already been beginning to transform how companies think about consumer loyalty, and this wave of innovation will only continue to accelerate. ShopNEXT will lead the trend by creating the most appealing Shop-To-Earn model, which can bring many benefits to users and merchants.
Fintech
Artmarket.com: Here’s why the art market, via the NFT revolution, will enjoy exponential growth with Artprice

For 25 years now, Artprice by Artmarket – world leader in art market information – has been studying, analyzing and researching the structure of the art market from every possible angle. This work has engaged all of its human and technical resources, including its art history department, its databases, its econometricians and statisticians, its sociologists, and of course its economists, jurists and tax specialists.
According to thierry Ehrmann, founder and CEO of the group, ‘Over the past five years, Artprice by Artmarket has literally second guessed the impact of NFTs on the art market by adding blockchain to its core database business and digitizing its historical art market standardization work. Artprice is the sole author of these projects with IP protection of its source codes since 1999′.
For its innovative R&D and its creation of Artpriceblockchain.com, Artmarket was awarded the prestigious state label “Innovative Enterprise” by the BPI (French public investment bank) in 2015 and then again in 2018 (it is rarely awarded more than once).
Artmarket.com is now setting its sights even higher as it launches its NFT ® Marketplace with a realistic ambition to generate a future turnover of several tens of millions of euros, and possibly even hundreds of millions in the longer term.
This ambition is based on the logic and reasoning explained below, which, on the one hand involves a specific and unique approach to Blockchain and NFTs, and on the other, relies on a historical, sociological and economic analysis of the art market.
Specific and unique approach to Blockchain and NFTs
In the design of its DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) Artmarket.com will produce ‘smart contracts’ registered on the Ethereum blockchain.
Today, Artmarket.com’s eco-responsibly designed DAO brings together the immutable and transparent rules governing the art market (one of the oldest market’s in the world) with total impartiality. Artprice has been scientifically codifying these rules for the last 25 years.
Artmarket.com’s DAO is transparent. It is de facto based on a supra-national framework and is the subject of contributions from the best historians, jurists, scientists and econometricians. These contributions have been collected over the past two decades to establish the company’s open data.
Artprice – world leader in art market information – has been the sole author of its databases for 25 years. Today, its databases are authoritative throughout the world and include the world’s largest documentary archive of notes, manuscripts and sales catalogs since 1700, which further guarantee the authenticity and historical legitimacy of its databases.
As a direct consequence of its reliability and its undisputed reputation in the art market, Artprice has the full capacity and is perfectly positioned to play the role of oracle (source of reliable information that allows the integration of variables from the real world into smart contracts) in Artmarket.com’s blockchain.
Artprice’s legitimacy as a blockchain oracle is based on its real-time collection of data from 6,300 auction houses around the world which automatically transfer their public auction results to Artprice.
Within Web 3.0 communities, an oracle can only be an oracle if it relies on a multitude of public sources, which is exactly what Artprice does with its 6,300 public sources.
As an oracle, Artprice will feed data from its databases. This data will include public auction results; historical, indexed and econometric data about artists and their works; detailed information concerning the traceability of works, etc.
As an oracle input, Artprice’s data will have the status of ‘recognized official market information’, and the activation or non-activation of ‘smart contracts’ will depend on the information provided by Artprice.
There is no doubt that Opensea and Rarible, to name but two, are among the NFT platforms that would immediately benefit from an industrial collaboration with Artmarket.com, the latter providing an indisputable, unavoidable and global art market reference going back a quarter of a century.
Artmarket.com will study each proposal, joint venture, capital participation, merger and/or acquisition and will give its approval if the proposals make good industrial sense and perpetuate its principal ethic: the promotion of art market information and transparency.
In view of the different legislation in force in France and, at a broader level, in Europe generally, Artmarket.com is looking into registering with the AMF as a Digital Assets Service Provider (DASP or PSAN in French) with a view to its forthcoming status as a FinTech company. At the same time, Artmarket.com will constantly monitor US and European legislation thereby allowing it and its American subsidiary to make the best choices as a future FinTech.
Historical, sociological and economic analysis of the art market
The following synthesis by Artmarket.com is based on the study of thousands of articles and reports, and hundreds of interviews, meetings and conferences on the world of cryptology, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, NFTs and the metaverse.
Thanks largely to the greater transparency and the greater ease of access to information – to which Artprice has been the main contributor in the world for 25 years – it has been made possible to observe that the art market experienced an overall turnover growth of +2700% between 2000 and 2020.
The art market’s growth – initially specific to the West – is now happening on five continents of the globe. Lately it has been substantially driven by a veritable explosion of the media employed by artists and the arrival of young artists with astonishing auction debuts in what is clearly now an efficient market.
The principal question Artprice has been studying and following closely is the impact of NFTs on the art market. Each of its annual reports devotes a large chapter to NFTs, such as its latest Contemporary Art Market Annual Report published in October 2021: https://www.artprice.com/artprice-reports/the-contemporary-art-market-report-2021
At the Beginning of 2022, Artmarket.com will publish a comprehensive report on NFTs and their impact on the art market.
Using the experience of its various departments, Artprice compares NFTs with the market for multiples (lithographs, prints, serigraphs, etc.) in the 20th century.
It was traditionally believed that multiples weakened artists whose markets were already established. This belief was essentially based on a technical and scientific reality: it was not possible to control with absolute certainty the number and quality of prints/multiples in circulation. As a result, prints/multiples are often considered the poor cousins of the art market.
Another interesting fact to consider before pursuing this comparison is liquidity. In reality, if you want to buy an artwork that you can be sure to sell within a year, you need to pay at least €20,000. In 2021, if you are looking for exit liquidity within a month, you need to pay at least €50,000.
NFT artworks, because they represent a complete paradigm shift, challenge the whole traditional economy of the art market.
Indeed, the NFT revolution, which undermines all the barriers inherent to the mores, customs and standards of the traditional art market, is now clearly approved by a broad consensus of users, collectors and creators, and notably, by whole communities of artists themselves.
Blockchain technology, via ‘smart contracts’, allows the issuance of ‘non fungible tokens’ with scientific certainty about their origin, their number and indeed about their every detail. This instantly affords confidence to the art market which, under these conditions, accepts the creation and circulation of multiples, which, in the past, might have weakened the artist’s market.
But, the NFT revolution doesn’t stop there. It is now based on digitally-certified issues that, thanks to blockchain, no-one can divert. For example, this allows a recognized artist (with an established price range) to issue a large number of NFTs forming a collection of digital works that become a sort of dialogue with his/her public. This interactivity will attract new collectors to the artist’s universe/metaverse. The artist will then be able to see his/her income and notoriety grow, without damaging his/her reputation and relationship with the art market’s key players.
According to our cross-checked calculations based on a large range of criteria and considerations, this radical transformation of the art market is likely to grow the population of art collectors from approximately 120 million today (with an average age of 54) to more than 900 million buyers of NFTs (and who knows what other artistic formats…) with a much younger and much more varied sociological profile.
Put simply, there exists today a whole generation of humans that has always lived with digital technology and completely understands that art NFTs are a sought-after, rare and speculative product surrounded by hype and considered avant-garde, and affording a degree of digital social recognition… and neither the hip factor, nor the modishness, nor the speculative aspect are a problem for this generation.
In addition, in 2021, digital media are absolutely everywhere: smartphones, smartTVs, tablets and computers, number in the billions. These high definition screens, now with very low power consumption due to MicroLEDs with deflationary prices, are increasingly prevalent in our daily lives, both in the private, and professional spheres, and in public spaces like airports and shopping centers, etc..
NFT Art has been conceptualized to penetrate into everyone’s daily lives, in an ‘ultra-democratization’ of art, without loss of rarity and quality. The revenues generated by this historic change are already spectacular, as we saw with the result of Beeple,alias Mike Winkelmann, ($69.3 million) at Christie’s, already rivaling historical auction records for physical works. These results are playing a spearhead role for this new world.
In addition, the new buyers of NFTs can engage in a form of double speculation: on the one hand, there’s the artwork which is a thousand times easier to sell (on an NFT platform) than the multiples of the last century; and on the other hand, there’s the fluctuation in the value of the cryptocurrency in which its value is denominated. This is a significant factor as it adds the possibility of economic gain to the pleasure of accessing art.
Through its expertise in the art market, Artprice by Artmarket has the ability to ‘bring out’ thousands of communities of artists (with known market prices) originating from recent trends like Street Art (whose visual works seems to have been born for NFTs) among others, or even more fringe trends like performance art, which has been always excluded from the mass market.
With Artmarket.com smart contracts, the artist or his/her beneficiaries and Artmarket.com will receive recurring income from the NFT artwork, from its primary issue to its various transactions on the secondary market.
What Artmarket.com brings to the NFT market is its guarantee as world leader in art market information along with its expertise, its extreme technological discipline and the strict terms in the metadata of its smart contracts, thereby creating the necessary conditions for the success of this new revolution in the art market.
The DNS artpricecoin.com, filed in December 2017 (along with all the corresponding names) illustrates Artprice by Artmarket’s early awareness of this paradigm shift to NFTs and cryptocurrencies.
As a global phenomenon, the advent of NFTs within a blockchain environment has parallels with the world of music. In its very early days, music was only available to those who went to listen to it. This changed with the technical capacity to record and reproduce sound on different media.
That technological advance democratized music, infinitely multiplying the listening possibilities. The number of musicians as well as the number of music enthusiasts literally exploded, generating colossal financial flows and profits within what is commonly called ‘the music industry’, which, at the end of 2021, had nearly one billion paying subscribers, thanks to digital technology.
With the arrival of NFTs, the paradigm shift in the art market is at least comparable. This change will take us towards a mass art market, but one that will always retain a certain elitist quality (like all cultural markets).
Through exchanges between Artprice by Artmarket and internationally renowned artists (and others) and/or their beneficiaries, we have become acutely aware of a strong demand to exploit the NFT medium in a carefully considered manner. And awareness of the potential of NFTs in the blockchain environment already appears to be very widespread.
For artists, past and present (768,000 artists are referenced and priced on Artprice by Artmarket), the NFT phenomenon represents a very powerful growth driver. Artists are the central core on which the whole art market is based and they will now apprehend the future of the art market, and their own futures, from a very positive angle within the Artmarket.com universe, which will progressively transform into a metaverse.
Images:
[https://imgpublic.artprice.com/img/wp/sites/11/2021/12/image1-AbodeofChaos-99.jpg]
[https://imgpublic.artprice.com/img/wp/sites/11/2021/12/image2-NFT-bill.jpg]
Copyright 1987-2021 thierry Ehrmann www.artprice.com – www.artmarket.com
- Don’t hesitate to contact our Econometrics Department for your requirements regarding statistics and personalized studies: [email protected]
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Fintech
Son Heung-min Signs Exclusive License Agreement with The9 Limited for NFT Collections Development and Sales Through NFTSTAR

The9 Limited (Nasdaq: NCTY) (“The9”), an established internet company, today announces that its NFT community and trading platform, NFTSTAR (www.nftstar.com), has signed an exclusive license agreement with South Korean football icon and Premier League star, Son Heung-min. NFTSTAR will develop, sell, and trade NFT collectibles authorized by Son.
Before joining Tottenham Hotspur in 2015, which made him the most expensive Asian player in history, Son Heung-min had previously played for Hamburger SV and Bayer Leverkusen. He has gone on to become the first Asian player to score more than 50 goals in the Premier League and is the highest Asian goal-scorer in both Premier League and Champions League history. Son was a key member of the South Korea national team for the 2014 and 2018 FIFA World Cup, included in the teams for the 2011, 2015 and 2019 AFC Asian Cup and 2018 Asian Games. Son was voted the Best Footballer in Asia in 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 and was nominated for the Ballon d’Or in 2019, achieving the highest rank ever for an Asian player. Son was also awarded Premier League Goal of the Season in the 2019-20 campaign for his strike against Burnley.
Son Heung-min will work with NFTSTAR’s world class creative team and artists to develop digital collections, including video, animation and other digital artwork, which will record the highlights of Son’s illustrious career and personal growth.
NFTSTAR is a NFT community and trading platform where users can purchase, trade and interact. The major transactions of content on the platform are NFT collections developed with global superstar licensed IPs. Each NFT collectible has a unique record on the blockchain, and the users will obtain the ownership of the unique NFT collectible through purchase on the platform, or through trading on NFTSTAR’s marketplace. NFTSTAR will accept general payment methods such as credit cards to make it easy for global users to participate.
NFTSTAR Community will feature celebrities from various fields, including but not limited to, sports, entertainment, art and culture. The NFTSTAR platform aims to create a significant portal to the future metaverse through superstars’ NFT collections, trading, and community interaction.
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