The cloud computing division of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group has launched new services for NFT platforms based outside of mainland China.
The features that Alibaba Cloud will provide include web hosting, digital marketing and content delivery, according to reports published in SCMP (owned by Alibaba) on June 9.
According to an Alibaba spokeswoman, NFT and Metaverse services are now listed on Alibaba Cloud’s international website. The company recently launched Metaverse-related products, including remote 3D rendering, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS).
Alibaba Cloud is trying to make its way into an international market dominated by Amazon Web Services. However, on the mainland, Alibaba Cloud holds a dominant 37% market share of China’s $27.4 billion cloud infrastructure services industry revenue.
NFTs are a legal grey area in China, a country that has already criminalized crypto mining and trading. The firm tweeted the NFT announcement on June 8, but it has since been deleted. There was also no apparent press release that could suggest pressure from the Beijing regime had been applied.
Alibaba subsidiaries Ant Group and Tencent Holdings had to rebrand their NFT platforms last year as “digital collectibles”, potentially for the same reason.
NFT Market Update
The move comes as NFT markets are getting hit hard during the crypto bear market. Since the beginning of May, the number of such sales has halved, according to market tracker Nonfunbible.com. The daily sales figure for June 9 was just below 20,000 whereas it was above 40,000 this time last month.
The platform recorded around $24 million in daily sales on June 9 and nearly $57 million on May 9. Active NFT wallets also fell to around 17,000 last week from over 90,000 in November. Cheaper Ethereum prices failed to trickle down to NFT markets as sales continue to decline.
Salesforce NFT Cloud Platform
San Francisco-headquartered cloud software firm Salesforce also announced the rollout of a closed pilot program for a new service called NFT Cloud. It will enable users to mint and manage NFTs for brand engagement and marketing purposes, according to reports.
Senior vice president of emerging technologies at Salesforce, Adam Caplan, told TechCrunch that company executives are looking for help getting into Web3.
The platform will run on a smart contract-based proof-of-stake blockchain, but it did not specify whether it would use an existing solution. Salesforce began working on a blockchain product in 2018 and introduced development tools the following year, but details are thin on the ground.
