Joe Raedle (Jack Dorsey pic) and Albert E Rodriguez (Jay Z pic)
- Rapper Jay-Z and Square CEO Jack Dorsey spoke on a Twitter space on Monday.
- Dorsey said the focus would be on how artists were compensated.
- The project would also include smart contracts, Jay-Z said.
- Sign up here for our daily newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell.
Rapper Jay-Z and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who co-own the Tidal music streaming platform, have signaled they may add non-fungible tokens and smart contracts to their app.
Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, and Dorsey took part in a Twitter space discussion on Monday and said they hoped to use NFTs as a means to better compensate artists.
"The spirit of what NFTs represent, the spirit of just looking critically at how artists are compensated, and of proving that, is something that we want to spend a lot of time and a lot of our focus on going forward," Dorsey said in the Cointelegraph report.
Dorsey is also CEO of payments firm Square, which is heavily invested in the crypto space and, in March this year, took a majority stake in Tidal.
NFTs are tokens that can represent an image, piece of video, audio, artwork or even virtual land. They can be bought and sold, but are not interchangeable, like a cryptocurrency.
The tokens have shaken up the creative community. Celebrities, artists and musicians have all rushed to create their own NFTs. The market reached around $2 billion in size in May this year. Sales have since cooled off somewhat.
"It's like a natural progression of what you do, to create art and protect your art and have a dialog with the people who consume it. We want to open up all the information tools and simplify it for anyone - anyone can come onto the platform and create" Jay-Z said in the Variety report.
Aside from NFTs, Tidal might also incorporate smart contracts. Smart contracts are, effectively, a program stored on a blockchain that automatically executes when a series of conditions are met. This might involve the exchange of money, property, shares or anything else of value, without an intermediary.
Smart contracts are in the mix to act as legally binding agreements that reside on specific blockchains like the ethereum network.
"With these blockchains and these smart contracts, you can write the contract today to say, any sale that happens, I want to receive 10% or 30%. Or you can write it out: 50% on the first one, 40% on the next," Jay-Z said.