Kodak develops its own cryptocurrency KodakCoin

Shares of Eastman Kodak stock were up more than 100% in afternoon trading. After the company announced a new cryptocurrency initiative. On Tuesday, the company unveiled a licensing partnership with Wenn Digital. They are to launch an image rights management platform called KODAKOne and a photo-centric cryptocurrency called KODAKCoin. The stock price opened at $3.10 a share Tuesday. It rose as high as $7.47 after the announcement was made at the CES technology show in Las Vegas.

The company said the KODAKOne platform will be an encrypted, digital ledger of rights ownership. It is for photographers to register both new and archival work that they can then license for use.  The company describes KODAKCoin as “a new economy for photography,”. It will allow photographers to receive payment for licensing their work immediately upon sale, sell their work confidently on a secure blockchain platform.  The system will be open to both professional and amateur photographers.

The KODAKOne platform will provide continual web crawling in order to monitor online use of images that have been registered. When unlicensed use is detected, the platform can help photographers reach licensing arrangements and get rewarded for their work. The initial coin offering will open on January 31, 2018. It is open to accredited investors from the U.S., UK, Canada and other select countries.

Kodak’s last desperate bid for relevance?

Eastman Kodak, the 131-year-old film pioneer that has been struggling for years to adapt to an increasingly digital world, filed for bankruptcy protection early in 2012. And then coming back in 2013.

“The real concern in the financial community is whether Kodak’s senior management has come up with this idea as a way to boost the stock price and let short-term holders cash out,” said George Conboy, chairman of Brighton Securities. Conboy says that analysts have been concerned for several quarters that Kodak’s core businesses didn’t seem to be taking the company in a positive direction. He’s sceptical whether this cryptocurrency initiative represents a sustainable business.”It appears that Kodak is jumping on a bandwagon that has lately been driven primarily by hysteria, and smacks of a move that suggests that management doesn’t have any better options.”

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