CNN announces first two NFT moments: Ted Turner’s launch speech and Baghdad

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CNN has announced its non-fungible token offering, Vault by CNN, is up and running and the first “moments” will be available Wednesday, June 30, 2021.

The first two offerings are from 1980 depicting when media mogul Ted Turner launched the network, featuring the speech he made before the network began its first newscast.

The second offering is one of the network’s most iconic moments: The January 1991 broadcast featuring John Holliman, Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw reporting live from Baghdad, Iraq as war broke out.

It includes Shaw saying the famous line “The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated” in an audio only report.

According to CNN’s Vault website, 500 of each of these initial  moments will be available and buyers will hold asset as “an officially licensed collectible.”

While there will still be other iterations of the video clips, the ones sold as NFTs via Vault will be the only officially authenticated ones and are tied to a blockchain, a database that is used to track cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Etherum.

The price of the first two moments was later revealed to be $25 each.

CNN says it will experiment with both “open editions” and “limited editions.”

Like other NFTs, the “moments” will be embedded with tokens that will verify their authenticity as an official NFT.

CNN has also made an effort to address environmental concerns about NFTs, which can require significant computing power to track and verify due to their reliance on the blockchain. “CNN is building on the Flow blockchain, which uses a proof-of-stake system, in which the capital cost comes from stakeholders holding tokens in the system, not from hardware and electricity,” reads the announcement.