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Not so quiet: Bjork embraces cryptocurrencies and blockchain with new album release
Bjork is the latest to jump on the cryptocurrency bandwagon.
The famous Icelandic singer announced Friday that fans can purchase her new album using cryptocurrencies and that everyone who does will be rewarded with an obscure cryptocurrency in return.
Bjork (pictured) is accepting payments in bitcoin, litecoin, dashcoin and something called “audiocoin.” Every fan who preorders her album will get 100 audiocoins in return, worth roughly 25 cents, according to Cryptocoin News.
Audiocoin, described by the people behind it as a “real virtual currency” and by others as “a real currency,” is pitched as a “game changing, decentralized music currency [that] rewards fans and artists at the same time.” Surprisingly, given the seemingly never-ending pitches of “initial coin offerings,” Audiocoin actually predates the tulip manialike ICO market in 2017, having launched in relative obscurity back in 2015.
Where the news actually gets interesting is with the management of the sales of the album. The rewarding of audiocoins is being managed via a custom blockchain designed by a firm called Blockpool. “For this project Blockpool looked at both a checkout plugin and also used it’s proprietary blockchain integration technology to build a smart rewards system,” Blockpool said in a blog post. “Blockpool’s cryptocurrency checkout plugin was built with flexibility in mind in order to be used on the popular shopping carts like Magento and Shopify.”
Because it seems you can never have enough in the way of cryptocurrencies, users are invited to claim their rewards via MyBlockpool, “the hub of Blockpool’s blockchain integration technology,” where they can create wallets for a number of cryptocurrencies along with “Blockpool Coins.”
Bjork’s new album is set to be released on Nov. 24, and its name — either ironically or aptly — is “Utopia.”
Picture: Zach Klein/Wikimedia Commons
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