Film Giant Kodak Joins Cryptocurrency Craze, Launches KodakCoin to Empower Photographers

Shares in photo firm Eastman Kodak soared nearly 120 percent after it revealed plans to mint its own crypto-currency the KodakCoin, BBC reported.

The US firm said it was teaming up with London-based Wenn Media Group to carry out the initial coin offering (ICO).

It is part of a blockchain-based initiative to help photographers control their image rights.

In an interview on the sidelines of CES 2018, Wenn Digital CMO Bruce Elliott told ZDNet that Kodak and Wenn have had a team of 20 people working on the KodakCoin project for “months and months”.

“We can get a photo, lock it into our blockchain, then we can sort of assign the IP [intellectual property] to the individual, then we can look through the entire internet and find where that photo is being used, and if it’s not being used correctly, then we can reach out to them with an automated system that says, ‘hey, you might not have known that you are using this photo without a licence, why don’t you get a licence to that’, and then that money comes back and gets paid back to the photographers, and that whole transaction happens with that KodakCoin cryptocurrency,” Elliott told media at CES. The CMO was quoted on ZDNet.

Kodak CMO Steven Overman said the KodakCoin project is an extension of the photography company's mission since its founding in the late 19th century to “empower photographers”.

“Today’s announcement is really exciting for us because we have got a terrific partner in Wenn Digital and it enables us to bring a mission that we have been passionate about since the origins of the company into the future with one of the most disruptive and innovative technologies there is,” Overman said. The CMO was quoted on ZDNet.

Kodak also detailed plans to install rows of Bitcoin mining rigs at its headquarters in Rochester, New York, BBC reported.

Details of this second scheme - which is being branded the Kodak KashMiner - were outlined at the CES tech show in Las Vegas.

Customers will pay up-front to rent mining capacity.

Kodak is the latest in a series of companies to see its value jump after revealing plans for blockchain-related activity.

 “This is a phenomenon we noticed again throughout the dot com days within the late 1990s the place conventional firms would point out some type of web technique and their inventory worth would soar up,” commented Garrick Hileman from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. Mr. Hileman was quoted on BBC.

“When you see inventory costs transferring like this it does look like troubling – it is onerous to say if there is a bubble nevertheless it definitely is indicative of a frothy funding market,” he added.

Mining involves carrying out processor-intensive tasks to solve complicated mathematical problems in order to verify crypto-currency transactions.

Any Bitcoins generated by Kodak KashMiner will be shared between the customer and the business.

The KashMiner operation will be run by Spotlite, a licensee that had previously teamed up with Kodak to use its brand to market LED lights, BBC reported.