This year’s Taobao Maker Festival – an annual Chinese arts and entrepreneurship event hosted by Alibaba’s own e-commerce platform Taobao – will showcase tokens for the first time. inedible (NFT).

At this year’s event, the decentralized app platform Near Protocol will partner with blockchain game company Web3Games and Chinese artist Huang Heshan to sell NFT-based real estate created by Huang.

Heshan’s virtual “Garden of Mercy” will be available for purchase during the event period, with the garden comprising more than 1,000 virtual structures including 10 “luxury single family villas”, 300 luxury apartments and 1,000 parasols.

Bu Tu Garden is part of Heshan’s first NFT collection, the “Toorich City Series” – built around the fictional real estate mogul Mr. Toorich, who has always dedicated himself to building houses in the market for the economically disadvantaged.

You can purchase NFT Garden Bu Tu in Chinese Yuan from Taobao’s website. The tokens must be confirmed with the near wallet.

The Taobao Maker Festival took place for the first time in 2016, this year’s event took place from July 17th to 25th at the Shanghai National Exhibition and Convention Center.

In an interview with Blockcast, Heshan shared his surprise at the ease of working with non-fungible tokens and said: “At first I thought the concepts of blockchain and NFT were very complicated.”

The self-described “socialist cyberpunk” also highlighted the minimal cost of NFT mining on Near compared to Ethereum, stating, “The cost of mining an NFT on Ethereum is on the order of hundreds or thousands of dollars. Almost costs a few cents and is very relevant. “

Connected: Virtual land may be worth more than real land after the property sold for a record $ 1.5 million

While Heshan’s digital real estate NFTs are pure works of art, crypto-enabled virtual real estate has seen significant growth in the last year or so, with a digital lot in the blockchain game Decentraland sold for over $ 900,000 last month.

Last week, Cointelegraph reported that Illuvium co-founder Kieran Warwick had a tip on a virtual property he bought in Axie Infinity last year at a profit of more than 9,000%.