Asian Tech Press (Mar. 18) -- It seems that the non-fungible token (NFT) is trying to get in the secondary market in China.
An announcement from Yuan Shijue, or Meta Vision, a digital collection platform operated by Chinese image licensing company Visual China Group, has recently sparked a buzz among the NFT industry.
Yuan Shijue said in the announcement that it "will soon start trial operation of the transfer function on its mobile website, and the timing and transfer rules will be announced accordingly."
Some believe that the launch of the transfer function on Yuan Shijue may be a signal that NFTs are trying to open up the secondary market in China.
The signal seems surprising, given that China's regulatory stance on virtual currencies has tended to be very strict.
In September 2021, Chinese regulators announced a ban on virtual currency mining activities, while making it clear that virtual currencies do not have the same legal status as legal tender and that related business activities are considered illegal financial ones.
China has been holding a cautious attitude towards blockchain, virtual currencies, digital collections and other related fields.
Since the creation of NFT to date, it has been impossible to dissociate itself from the word "finance". Although NFT is not equivalent to virtual currency, both share the same technical foundation, involving certain financial risks, and China has strict restrictions on the secondary flow and transactions of NFT.
It is well-known that 2021 has been hailed as "the year of the NFT". Data from DappRadar showed that the global NFT market was valued at $22 billion in 2021, compared with just $100 million in 2020.
The applications of NFT in China are currently more or less limited to digital collections and digital artwork, and the local NFT market is commonly known as a marketplace for digital collectibles.
The major NFT platforms in China have reached a consensus that NFT can be used as digital collections, but cannot be invested in, let alone speculated on.
Although NFT is an emerging concept for the masses in China, various Chinese agencies and companies have already started to establish NFT-related standards in the past year.
In September 2021, the China Technology Market Association (CTMA) under the Ministry of Science and Technology established a special working group with several organizations, aiming to develop a set of relevant group standards that are suitable for China's national conditions and meet the needs of the long-term healthy development of the NFT industry in China.
In October 2021, the National Intellectual Property Exchange Centre Alliance, together with relevant organizations and leading Internet enterprises, including Ant Group, Tencent and JD.com, signed the first self-regulatory convention for China's NFT industry.
The development of these industry standards will provide some reference value for the formulation of NFT-related regulatory measures in the near future.
NFT has weakened its trade-related attributes in China, highlighting the function of certification of ownership of an digital collection, and its direction of development is different from the overseas NFT market.
China's leading Internet players and state-owned outlets have ventured into the digital collection market, utilizing NFT as a digital certificate that functions as proof of ownership, and focusing on the exploration of tokenless NFT.
For example, Shi Cang, or Time Collection, a digital copyright collection platforma developed by a technology company owned by China's state-run Xinhua News Agency, went live for public testing on Thursday.
Despite the involvement of the state news agency in the NFT industry, the regulation imposed on it remains strong, with multiple mini-apps for digital collection platforms banned by Tencent's WeChat.
Tencent responded that digital collections currently are an area not opened by WeChat's applets.
As digital collectibles in China, NFT has a non-fully decentralized platform structure and an incomplete open secondary market, which means that local participants can only share the revenue of the primary market.
Industry insiders have argued that NFT in China has not achieved true assetization of digital content in China, and NFT users only have the right to use rather than own, and property rights cannot be clearly defined, so the new economic system of the metaverse cannot be successfully built.
They believe that in the future, seeking a solution that opens up the secondary market while curbing speculation is the key to the further development of China's NFT industry.
