Share this article
Web3 Firm Artifact Labs Raises $3.25M From Blue Pool Capital, Animoca, Others
Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post spun off its NFT business into a new firm called Artifact Labs last year.
By Sam Reynolds
Updated May 9, 2023, 4:13 a.m. Published May 8, 2023, 1:00 p.m.
Artifact Labs, a Web3 company that works to preserve records of historical events on the blockchain, has closed a $3.25 million funding round.
The round was led by Blue Pool Capital, with Animoca Ventures also participating. Blue Pool Capital, is a fund that principally invests the wealth of Alibaba founders Jack Ma and Joe Tsai.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
Artifact Labs said in the release it plans to utilize the funds to expand the company's operations, emphasizing an increase in developers.
“It’s not about creating new IPs for speculation – for example NFT hype projects – it’s about driving new engagement with historically significant collections by using Web3,” Phillip Pon, CEO of Artifact Labs, said in a release. “We want to carve new space in the younger public’s consciousness for historical brands and artifacts…while supporting these important organizations with new revenue streams to fund their preservation work, we are also solidifying immutable on-chain data preservation through NFTs.”
Artifact Labs was initially incubated by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP). In 2021 the SCMP launched a non-fungible token (NFT) standard called ARTIFACT for recording historical data.
Throughout 2021 and 2022, the newspaper had a brisk business of selling NFTs of its historical front pages, including the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the Avian flu outbreak, the Asian Financial Crisis, and the death of the U.K.'s Princess Diana.
Artifact Labs said in a release that it will be releasing NFT collections as a revenue stream for preservation organizations as well as developing and releasing technology to help institutions preserve their archives on-chain.
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Pye Finance Raises $5M Seed Round Led by Variant and Coinbase Ventures
The platform aims to make locked Solana staking positions tradable via an onchain marketplace.
What to know:
- Pye Finance raised a $5 million seed round led by Variant and Coinbase Ventures, with participation from Solana Labs, Nascent and Gemini.
- The startup is building an onchain marketplace on Solana for time-locked staking positions that can be traded.
- Pye says the product targets Solana’s large pool of staked SOL, worth roughly $75 billion, and aims to give validators and stakers more flexibility over terms and reward flows.
Top Stories
