Binance makes ‘multi-million dollar’ investment in content monetization startup

Binance Labs, an initiative by cryptocurrency exchange Binance to fund startups, has made a “multi-million dollar” investment in Contentos, a blockchain-powered network that allows creators to keep track of what happens to their content.

In its press release, Contentos said, “Unlike similar projects building new products and features to adapt to blockchain technology, the Contentos team has already integrated with three successful products, LiveMe, PhotoGrid, and Cheez, and is currently available to users around the world.”

Binance Labs Head Ella Zhang said, “We are dedicated to identifying the real use cases to implement blockchain technologies. There’s a clear pain-point to be solved in the content creation industry, and we see Contentos is the right team with critical resources to solve the problem.”

Contentos CEO and co-founder Mick Tsai explained, “The idea for Contentos began when I noticed a serious need for a decentralized content ecosystem offering transparent and fair monetization of creators’ content, and no third-party censorship or removal of content,” adding that the collaboration with Binance would help “in pursuing our goal to revolutionize the preservation and monetization of digital content, while working towards creating a more positive ecosystem for all content creators, influencers, and content consumers.”

The Contentos website outlines the advantages of using blockchain for monetization of content: peer-to-peer revenue distribution; decentralized traffic distribution; trackable copyright transactions; and an immutable credit scoring system. Currently, the Contentos ecosystem has 3.5 million videos and 159.4 million live-streamed videos.

Among other partnerships Contentos has formed are those with Ontology, which customizes blockchains depending on their application, and the NEO Foundation, which provides an investment platform for blockchain projects.

Last June, Binance Labs announced its allocation of $1 billion to aid startups. It has also begun looking into investments in Africa, where it sees adoption potential beyond that in developed regions. According to Binance, Africa may overtake Asia in usage of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.