Voice launches public beta of its carbon-neutral NFT platform to help creators mint new NFTs with zero gas fees

In June 2019, Voice made headlines after the Peter Thiel-backed crypto startup Block.one announced it bought the domain name Voice.com for $30 million, making it the most expensive (publicly announced) domain ever sold. The domain was sold by MicroStrategy, a Virginia-based tech company founded by the renowned Bitcoin investor Michael Saylor.

For about a year after the big purchase, Voice.com was used as a blockchain-based social network platform, which the company dubbed as a decentralized version of Facebook and Medium. But the platform didn’t really gain enough traction and Voice.com was shut down for good.

Then as we reported back in May, Voice announced it was pivoting to become an NFT platform, with a plan to launch in the summer of this year. It was a good move for the company considering the red hot NFT market. Late last month, payments giant Visa also jumped into the NFT craze, buying a ‘CryptoPunk’ for $165,000.

Now, the day has finally come. Today, Voice.com launched what looks to be a public beta of an environmentally friendly NFT platform to help emerging creators to get discovered. Unlike other NFT platforms where users have to pay Ethereum gas fees, users and creators alike can mint new NFTs with zero gas fees, which was made possible by Block.one, the parent company of Voice.

Block.one is the originator and operator of EOSIO, the leading open-source blockchain software protocol, which according to Wikipedia, claims to eliminate gas fees. A quick glance at the new public beta page shows that Voice allows users to easily buy NFTs using regular credit cards, unlike other NFT marketplaces like Open Sea where purchases are made using Ether.

“Through NFTs, creators are now empowered to capture and share their digital expressions on their own terms. And this is only the beginning,” Voice says on its website. The public beta also includes NFTs from featured creators including Megan Ganey, a multimedia artist, and designer who engages her education in art, and photography.

The digital art market has exploded since the January of this year after the report of a single piece of a non-fungible token (NFT) art sold at Christie’s Auction for a record-setting $69.3 million, making it the most expensive digital art ever sold. Since the beginning of 2021, the digital art world has been dominated by human artists, musicians, and creators. Now Visa becomes the latest company to join the NFT craze.

Founded in 2017 by Brendan Blumer, Block.one is an open-source software publisher specializing in high-performance blockchain technologies. Its first project, EOSIO, a blockchain protocol designed to enable secure data transfer and high-performance decentralized applications, has received global recognition as the first performant blockchain platform for developers, following its introduction in May 2017. The EOSIO engineering team is led by Dan Larimer, the inventor of the revolutionary Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) consensus mechanism.