We’re announcing an exciting change in our roadmap, releasing a more extensive and ambitious alpha version of the Wemark marketplace. It will result in a slight delay in launch, but one that comes for all the right reasons.

Our Status & Recent Developments

We always knew stock photography would be one of the fastest growing applications of blockchain in digital content, but we couldn’t anticipate the level of excitement we’ve seen over the last couple of months. We’re being approached by the biggest stock photo agencies, top-selling image producers, the world’s largest photography communities, and more. Here’s the scoop:

Over the past month, we’ve had some major developments take root. We signed exclusive partnership deals with some of the biggest players in stock photography — Monkey Business, Cavan, The Good Brigade and Mint Images.

Our recent partnership activities, along with an overwhelming number of photo submissions in our online platform (live in alpha), took our collection to new heights with over 300K images, including more than 150K premium images.

Cavan Images, one of our early content partners

I’ll be at in Cepic 2018, taking place in May 30–31 in Berlin — one of the commercial content industry’s biggest conferences. We’ve already scheduled more than 16 meetings with potential content partners and will be giving a short talk and participating in two panels about blockchain for digital content and new ways of licensing.

Over the next few weeks, we expect our collection to grow to more than one million images — all before we even launch the marketplace to the public!

Everything is moving at light speed — we never anticipated this level of excitement, number of photos and calibre of partnerships. We could never even dream of getting these achievements so early on.

The Alpha version of Wemark was first planned as a basic and early interface for licensing a modest collection of photos. However, the unprecedented volume of high-quality content and amazing partners at such an early stage has made us reconsider our original plans.

We’ve decided to exploit this opportunity and turn the Alpha of our marketplace into a product that’s more usable and scalable, with a collection of images that’s larger and more diverse than what most of the leading stock agencies had when they launched their own marketplaces.

This requires more planning, more development — and ultimately — more time.

What do we do?

Sleep less. The entire Wemark team is eager to take on this opportunity and push ourselves towards making Wemark and direct-licensing the future of stock photography and digital content as a whole.

The entire Wemark team is eager to take on this opportunity and push ourselves towards making Wemark and direct-licensing the future of stock photography and digital content as a whole. Delay the launch in a few weeks. We’d love to stay loyal to our roadmap and the promises we made to our community, but at this early stage, we must make quick, agile decisions and be pragmatic. This delay was a difficult decision, but we are confident it will be better for the company, our contributors, and the entire community. Our new timeframe for launching the alpha is mid-end July 2018, still right around the corner.

What’s made the decision even harder is our upcoming TGE which gained incredible momentum and was initially scheduled for June 7th. Despite the lack of clear regulation regarding digital tokens, we don’t believe that utility tokens should be sold to the public before they have real utility. We want to do this the right, responsible way.

For that reason, we’re moving the TGE start date a few weeks to July 24th.

The whitelisting process will keep going, with an extended deadline of July 23th for contributors who want to participate in the first days of the sale.

The onboarding of new partners, creators and their content will continue at full-force. We’ll also be announcing an official partners program and many new partnerships are in the works — some will be announced later this week.

We’re excited about the future of Wemark, and as you can see from our rapid growth, partnerships and pre-launch image volume, we’re not the only ones. It might take slightly longer than we hoped, but thousands of photographers and customers will soon transact directly, with much more efficiency and transparency, and leave the agencies behind.

Stay tuned!