China’s state news agency launches NFT collection

Despite demands for tight monitoring by central bank officials, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency is still releasing a collection of NFTs.

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In an announcement on Wednesday, China’s official Xinhua news agency will release its first series of NFT collectibles.

The move is in support of blockchain technology that was previously shunned by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In an official announcement, Xinhua News Agency plans to release 10,000 copies of 11 photos taken by journalists by 2021.

Getting started with NFTs is confusing given recent events in the world’s second largest economy. After a nationwide crackdown on cryptocurrencies that banned the mining of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), China recently targeted NFTs in the Metaverse and suggested they monitor them closely. Despite the anti-crypto sentiment, tech giants Tencent and Huawei are intrepid in their pursuit of branding in the Metaverse.

In another development, several websites, including ChainNews, went offline in early December as part of a large-scale anti-crypto raid. The Chinese crypto media are holding back on their World Wide Web pages, instead focusing on the growing communities on Twitter and Telegram.

Oddly though, this isn’t the country’s first step towards the NFT. In “DeFi Summertime 2.0”, The South China Early Morning Article created a series of NFTs that use a new token standard called “ARTIFACT”, which is used to preserve historical assets on the blockchain. It is important to note, however, that SCMP is based in Hong Kong. This paper therefore benefits from the higher levels of autonomy, as well as the independent executive, legislative, and judicial branches that Hong Kong is known for.

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Hong Kong is no stranger to blockchain technology or NFTs. In June of this year, pro-Hong Kong activists managed to archive articles from the pro-democratic Hong Kong newspaper on the blockchain. More than 4,000 Apple Everyday articles have been uploaded to ARWeave, a popular blockchain storage platform supported by Andreessen Horowitz.

Finally, the PRC NFT release begs the question, does Xinhua’s NFT release signal a nod to the advent of blockchain technology? At the time of writing, China’s NFT supporters are still limited in their trading activities. NFTs cannot be resold after purchase, while the only currency available to NFT fans is the local currency, the yuan. Given the widespread anti-crypto stance in 2021, more evidence is needed for the PRC’s move into the blockchain space.