Alibaba Cloud launches NFT marketplace solutions

Alibaba Cloud, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing unit, announced it has launched NFT solution services for NFT platforms outside mainland China on Wednesday. 

The NFT solutions aim to enable artists and creators to monetize their NFT projects with ease, by offering web hosting services, digital marketing and global content delivery service, CDN, which allows data distribution through Alibaba Cloud’s service nodes worldwide. 

The news follows the e-commerce company’s introduction of Metaverse-related offerings, which include generating 3D content remotely along with data analytics, artificial intelligence and Blockchain-as-a-serve (BaaS) products. 

The web hosting services will allow users to build reliable NFT marketplace web servers with ease of high elasticity using Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) and Auto Scaling. Static content including images and text, non-sensitive data like platform ID and user aliases in Object Storage Service can be stored in a secure database.

Under the digital marketing services, users can create marketing efficient marketing channels to reach customers via integrated SMS. Alibaba’s SMS selects the best route in real-time and uses authentication as users send promotional, notification and verification messages to customers worldwide in a timely and secure fashion.

Finally, the Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Server Load Balancer (SLB) provide high-performance NFT delivery service across the globe via Alibaba’s Cloud nodes. According to Alibaba Cloud, their Classic Load Balancer (CLB) runs on Layer 4 and processes up to 100,000 queries per second (QPS), and their Application Load Balancer (ALB) runs on Layer 7 and supports up to 1,000,000 QPS.

Alibaba Cloud has not revealed whether Blockchain for the NFT marketplaces will support cryptocurrencies. The Blockchain the service will be built on also remains unknown. It announced its intentions to support the adoption of NFTs and digital art. 

This initiative also comes in uncertain times in China, as tech companies navigate the hurdles presented by the country’s new Data Security Law, which came into effect in September 2021. The law limits any cross data transfer without the government's endorsement.