Commentary

'Time' Partners With Blockchain Investment Firm To Educate Readers On Metaverse

Time magazine is launching an awards-and-recognition program and a weekly newsletter about cryptocurrency in an initiative to educate readers about the metaverse.

As part of its plans, the company will hold the digital coin ether (ETH) on its balance sheet for the first time and partner with the crypto investment firm Galaxy Digital in the project.

The weekly newsletter, Into the Metaverse, launched Thursday. Entries for a new Time 100 Companies category, Metaverse, also kicked off last week and will stay open through the end of the year.

The partners, Time and Galaxy Digital, are seeking to “demystify the next immersive digital frontier, the metaverse,” according to a statement. Time will host additional metaverse educational resources on its new Time for Learning branded-content page, to be unveiled in December, leveraging Galaxy Digital’s deep expertise in virtual worlds to explain the metaverse and its exciting potential for the future.

“Before we can build the metaverse, we need to define it, since, today, the word connotes vastly different things to different people,” said Sam Englebardt, general partner at Galaxy Interactive, a unit of Galaxy Digital. “So, with our partners at Time, our first objective is to create a shared lexicon and understanding of the idea and the opportunities that are emerging as we become an increasingly digital species and continue (and accelerate) our ongoing journey from the physical to the virtual world.”

Added Galaxy Digital CEO-founder Mike Novogratz, “Over the next decade, the metaverse will become an increasingly important part of the world economy. Our physical and digital realities are already becoming hard to distinguish. We look forward to partnering with Time as we seek to bring readers, creators, and the curious into the metaverse.”

The weekly newsletter will explore the blurring of the digital and the physical, as well as highlight communities emerging in new digital settings. It will interview leaders at the forefront of the business, innovation and culture taking place within the metaverse.

The transaction between Time and Galaxy Digital was conducted in Ethereum (ETH), marking a first for a major media organization. This payment follows Time beginning to accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment for digital subscriptions in April, which itself followed the magazine's offering of an exclusive series of three covers as non-fungible tokens at auction, including one of the most iconic covers in Time’s 98-year history and a first cover designed exclusively as an NFT — a non-fungible token.

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