WordPress, an open-source content management system is planning to launch a new publishing platform that will offer blockchain features and will be backed by Ethereum development studio ConsenSys, Google and more.
The new product named as “Newspack” was announced by the company on Monday 14th Jan 2019. The publishing platform will offer technology and support for medium and small-sized organizations and notably the ‘inexpensive’ platform ever introduced by the WordPress.
Talking about the investments from tech giants, Google has made an investment of $1.2 million while ConsenSys has contributed $350,000. Apart from that, Newspack has also managed to gather funding from James L. Knight Foundation ($250,000) and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism ($400,000), respectively. WordPress also updated that another $200,000 will be contributed from a fifth source toward the project later this month.
One of the ConsenSys representatives made a confirmation about the investment with Coindesk on Wednesday and further added that Newspack will offer the option to use blockchain-based features to all the newsrooms accessing the platform that will be made available through ConsenSys-backed Civil Media.
Civil’s Publisher product will be installed as a plugin on the WordPress platform, allowing newsrooms accessing the Newspack platform to permanently archive content on a decentralized network.
The representative from ConsenSys mentioned, “The plugin will also act as a portal that will walk newsrooms through how to join the Civil Registry, the hub of community-vetted and -approved newsrooms.” He further added that for consumers seeking news the platform will also offer access to a ‘discovery portal’.
It is not the first time that WordPress is making use of the blockchain technology as earlier WordPress have accepted payments in Bitcoin for some of its services in the year 2012 and 2015. And now it is expected that the company might re-start accepting Bitcoins in the future in return of the services they are planning to offer.
