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Photography enthusiasts have something new to look forward to with Canon’s latest venture into the world of NFTs. At the annual NFT.NYC event, the camera maker recently announced the development of Cadabra, a new digital marketplace specifically curated for photography NFTs.
The photo NFTs market hasn’t gotten as much hype as other types of NFTs, like Profile Pictures (PFPs) or generative art, but it has been gaining traction lately. Canon’s decision to enter this space is a significant move that could help legitimize it even more and draw in more photographers and collectors to join the market.
With the Cadabra marketplace, Canon aims to empower photographers by connecting them with enthusiastic collectors who share their appreciation for digital works of art. While there aren’t many specific details on how the marketplace will work just yet, Canon promises to share more information on the creators and the platform’s ‘first launch’ later this year.
According to the press release, the artworks will be organized into different categories, including landscape, wildlife, lifestyle, sport, abstract, and more, to highlight the outstanding works of the invited creators. Still unknown are the names of the artists who will be part of the project, another detail that Canon will reveal soon. The marketplace will offer both the initial drop of photo collections and a secondary marketplace for the resale of NFT.
At an early stage, the marketplace will only be available in the US, with further availability that Canon has not yet specified. Some NFT marketplaces require users to purchase items with specific cryptocurrencies. Canon says Cadabra will support cryptocurrency wallets and credit and debit cards.
Cadabra will mint all digital art on the Ethereum blockchain, ensuring its authenticity and uniqueness. Further, Canon says that creators of all levels will also be able to choose to offer buyers prints with their initial donations, that Canon will make, enabling digital content owners to have a physical item to display.
For the Japanese company, this is not the first experience in the world of NFTs. In 2022, different members of its exclusive Canon Legends program collaborated with Immutable Image to create Solana-based NFTs based on a limited collection of their photographs. They released the NFTs under ‘The Legends Mint’ collection on OpenSea, that included photographic NFTs by Sam Abell, Barbara Bordnick, Gregory Heisler, Ryszard Horowitz, Walter Iooss, Jr., Melvin Sokolsky, and Joyce Tenneson.
That’s not all. Canon’s focus on the future extends beyond the world of NFTs and is making its moves on the metaverse and virtual reality space. During the CES 2023 event, the company surprisingly did not make a single mention of its hardware. A clear sign of a decline in consumers’ appetite for cameras in the smartphone era.
Instead, Canon unveiled Kokomo, its first application for a VR platform that allows people to communicate face-to-face in a virtual, metaverse-like space with live video and in ‘life-sized environments’. It’s quite a revolutionary concept because, unlike traditional video calls, Kokomo makes the interlocutor’s full body visible.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Jon Lorentz - one of the co-creators of the Kokomo solution- stated:
“This is representing a very exciting new innovation for Canon – but also a very new business direction for Canon, as well … As you know, traditionally, Canon is very much tied to our hardware products. When we announced AMLOS at CES last year, it was about innovating work from home. Our task [with Kokomo] is to innovate life at home, and that is where this project came from.”