Besides fintech, e-commerce is another burgeoning market defying the pandemic. Led by America’s Amazon, the market has maintained significant growth in the face of the pandemic, buoyed by the shift to online shopping.

While Amazon leads the market, other players in the market including China’s Alibaba and India’s Flipkart have recorded great market feats that include huge fundraising in the middle of global health and economic crisis.

On Monday, Flipkart announced a new round of $3.6 billion at a post-money valuation of $37.6 billion as race to dominate the Indian market heat up between the Indian startup and Amazon. TechCrunch noted that the funding is widely believed to be the pre-IPO round for the Indian e-commerce conglomerate as it works to list in the public markets as soon as early next year.

The new round of funding, which was led by GIC, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Walmart, along with investments from sovereign funds DisruptAD, Qatar Investment Authority, Khazanah Nasional Berhad, Tencent, Willoughby Capital, Antara Capital, Franklin Templeton and Tiger Global, is by far the largest for any Indian startup.

Per TechCrunch, the Monday investment marks the return of SoftBank as a shareholder of Flipkart. SoftBank, which had taken the exit from the startup when the Bangalore-based firm sold majority stakes to Walmart in 2018 at a valuation of $22 billion, has reinvested about $500 million in the new round.

“At Flipkart, we are committed to transforming the consumer internet ecosystem in India and providing consumers access and value. This investment by leading global investors reflects the promise of digital commerce in India and their belief in Flipkart’s capabilities to maximise this potential for all stakeholders,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Chief Executive Officer at Flipkart Group, in a statement.

“As we serve our consumers, we will focus on accelerating growth for millions of small and medium Indian businesses, including kiranas. We will continue to invest in new categories and leverage made-in-India technology to transform consumer experiences and develop a world-class supply chain.”

Krishnamurthy said on Monday that Flipkart is also giving its employees the option to sell their stock options worth $80.5 million, as part of the new fundraise.

The $3.6 billion has greatly eclipsed Flipkart’s earlier attempt to raise money this year, looking to raise just about $1 billion.

Amazon has invested over $6.5 billion in the South Asian market in an attempt to rule the booming Indian market, an attempt Flipkart is aiming to thwart with the new funding.

Both the firms are struggling to aggressively expand their footprint in India, but they also have a third entity to reckon with.

E-commerce platform JioMart, a joint venture between Reliance Retail (India’s largest retail chain) and Google and Facebook-backed Jio Platforms (India’s largest telecom operator), launched last year in over 200 cities and towns across the nation.

Though India is a huge brick and mortar country, where physical stores continue to drive the vast majority of retail sales, it is becoming one of the world’s fastest-growing e-commerce markets.

The e-commerce market is poised to grow even further as India unveils its digital economy. Although its economy has come under pandemic-induced turmoil, India’s digital economic future is poised for a lift as more first-time internet users begin to shop online.

India’s e-commerce market is estimated to reach more than 300 million shoppers by 2025, according to estimates by Bain & Company. These shoppers would have bought items worth more than $100 billion from online platforms, the firm projected.

As the race between Flipkart and Amazon continues in India, both firms are pushing to gain the market with enticements. Recently, both of them have, besides rolling out support for Hindi language, partnered with neighborhood stores.

“Flipkart is a great business whose growth and potential mirrors that of India as a whole, that’s why we invested in 2018 and why we continue to invest today,” said Judith McKenna, President and CEO of Walmart International, in a statement.

Flipkart says it has amassed over 350 million registered users across its services, including fashion e-commerce Myntra in the country.

“Flipkart’s logistics and supply chain arm, Ekart, employs more than 100,000 people and makes deliveries to more than 90% of the addressable pin-codes in India, which, coupled with strategic warehouse infrastructure investments, is one of the group’s core strengths. Venturing into the social commerce space, Flipkart recently announced the launch of Shopsy, which will encourage local entrepreneurship,” the firm said.

While the planet is struggling with a pandemic, the field of contemporary art, like slots online Canada casinos that are flourishing now, has gone online. The virtual world has become for her not a forced refuge, but a platform for development and innovation. So, now all the attention of art connoisseurs and collectors is focused on NFT-tokens or virtual digital units in the blockchain network. Is the role of NFTs in the art market that significant, and can they change it once and for all?

Understanding What Crypto-Art Is 

NFT-tokens are a kind of digital certificate, which confirms the right to own a virtual asset, be it an image, a video, or audio. Virtual objects could be bought before the appearance of NFT, but before NFT, there was no record of the data of the rights holder – now it is openly stored on blockchain platforms. Even after an NFT object is sold, it remains on the Internet: anyone can download it, print it out, and, for example, hang it on the wall, but the original belongs to the buyer.

Everybody is selling tokens right now: first, the blockchain company Injective Protocol burns a live painting by Banksy to turn the performance into a digital object, then Edward Snowden sells his token for 5.5 million dollars, and the singer The Weeknd announces his new song in the NFT format. Thanks to tokens, it’s easy to make a fortune in seconds: singer Grimes made almost $6 million in 20 minutes, and artist Beeple made $69 million for just one painting.

The Boom in the Crypto-Art Market 

On the one hand, the boom in the crypto-art market is a legitimate event both in terms of technical progress and coronavirus limitations. In addition, the NFT-market makes life easier for artists: they do not need to work through intermediaries anymore to sell their works – all they need is to have an account on a special resource and to pay a small commission for the service, which is especially beneficial for beginners. Such an initiative also makes it possible to better monitor compliance with copyrights and stop the distribution of pirated material, and streaming services can license films and serials more quickly.

First, this kind of art is vulnerable to server failures and fraud attacks. For example, many artists have been attacked and had their works in the public domain illegally assigned NFT codes. As a result, scammers stole numerous art objects and began actively reselling them. Second, although blockchain platforms themselves pay special attention to copyright, this process has not yet been regulated at the legislative level in many countries. Also, purchasers only get the right to dispose of the token, but the creator still holds the copyright. In short, there are significant changes in the legal field, but the final unification of all norms and rules is to be worked on and worked on.

Crypto-Art Has Found Its Niche in the Art Market

However, the conversation about NFT-tokens is more interesting. The excitement around virtual art objects reflects an important feature – people are willing to pay not for the content, but for a certificate of authenticity, which is characteristic of the entire art market. A case in point is Peter Paul Rubens’ painting “Portrait of a Lady”, which for almost 140 years was considered to be the work of his student: after the discovery of the true authorship of the painting, its price skyrocketed by 40 times. Now the identity of the creator and the buyer prevail over the work of art, while it is secondary and, like crypto-art, can be copied and reproduced tens of millions of times with the consent of the rights owner.

In addition, the boom on the NFT-market testifies to the urgent problem of copyright regulation on the Internet, where against the background of the rapidly increasing number of users and content, uniform and working mechanisms are needed to struggle against pirated content. The popularity of streaming services for watching movies and listening to music is another step on the way to licensing Internet materials and finding a compromise with the interests of users, who are used to using torrents. At the same time, there is no fear that the World Wide Web is turning into a particularly controlled place with anti-utopian rules and orders – probably the Internet will remain free, but with certain reservations.

But this is a talk about the future, but for now, already this year the market capitalization of the NFT can increase 3-4 times in comparison with 2020. And this is another argument to pay attention to the new art-sphere. After all, in 2021, the virtual world sometimes becomes much more real than the offline world – especially in times of social distance and masked mode.