We’ve come a long way since the Gutenberg – in fact, publishing itself has largely gone digital these days, although people still buy physical printed books.
Some major publishers are even going beyond digitizing the printed page, and into what experts are calling the “new Internet” – using blockchain technologies that allow for decentralized consensus-based transactions.
Some of this news happens today as European publisher Axel Springer announced partnering with Satoshipay to enable blockchain payments.
A Satoshipay wallet will be the vehicle for the company which owns brands like Bild, Die Welt and Fakt to offer these types of digital plans.
“Blockchain payments can significantly reduce transaction costs and thus enable new monetization systems for content,” Axel Springer SVP Dr. Valentin Schöndienst said recently, according to a Bankless Times piece posted yesterday. “SatoshiPay offers a turnkey solution that allows us to instantly use blockchain technology and offer it to our customers”.
“We are excited to work with Axel Springer, who recognize the immense potential ofblockchain technology,” SatoshiPay founder and CEO Meinhard Benn added. “As one of the few companies with a market-ready blockchain payment solution, we are focused on bringing this technology from laboratories and into the mainstream. This has been SatoshiPay’s mission since its foundation in 2014, and a partner with the tremendous reach of Axel Springer gives us the opportunity to deliver on this promise.”
Axel Springer is no small press: with 15000 employees and revenues in the billions of Euros annually, this brand controls a major portion of what European’s read. Directing these deals toward blockchain tech is a significant move, echoed by similar changes at work in European national governments; one of these, the use of Hyperledger by the Italian Post Office, we reported on just yesterday. The Axel Springer move is a sort of corresponding private sector deal: entrepreneurs of all stripes are seing the big benefits of blockchain write large as experts tout 2019 as “the year for blockchain.”
Nor is Axel Springer the only “wordsmith” business to go blockchain this week, even. Today, Helen Partz at Cointelegraph is reporting on how WordPress, for its part, is pursuing an ungrade having to do with blockchain.
“Earlier in January, blockchain tech firm Consensys joined a project developing a new revenue-generating news platform by WordPress, the world’s most popular website management system,” Partz wrote. “Through an investment of $350,000, ConsenSys joined leading publishing industry organizations such as Google News, The Lenfest Institute for Journalism and The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.”
Look for more as new companies explore the upside of blockchain and build pilot programs that will change how we shop, and how we live, in the years to come.