key takeaways
- China is establishing an NFT market.
- The platform was built by the state-sponsored China Technology Exchange.
- Interoperability between the Chinese NFT market and decentralized blockchains currently seems unlikely.
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China is following up its CBDC efforts with a state-sponsored NFT marketplace, which would allow digital copyrights and digital collections to be traded on a blockchain called the China Cultural Security Chain.
China’s cultural safety chain
According to China Daily, the Chinese government is planning the release the nation’s first state-sponsored NFT marketplace.
The “China Digital Asset Trading Platform,” as it is called in the article, has a launch ceremony scheduled for January 1, 2023 in Beijing. The platform was partially built by the China Technology Exchange, a national technology institution established by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the State Intellectual Property Office, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Beijing Municipal People’s Government.
The NFT marketplace is expected to enable transactions of intellectual property rights, digital copyrights, and digital collections. The platform will ostensibly use a blockchain called the China Cultural Security Chain, but will still rely on trading instruments and settlement mechanisms provided by the state-sponsored China Technology Exchange.
Details surrounding the NFT market are scant, except for the fact that it will allow for secondary trading of digital assets. China’s Cultural Security Chain is most likely centralized, which means that all NFTs supported by the chain will belong to the entity that controls it, not the users, as is the case with Ethereum or other blockchains. .
The report also did not mention interoperability between China’s Cultural Security Chain and other blockchains. Due to the current negative view of the Chinese government towards decentralized cryptocurrencies (the country repressed on cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency-related activities in 2021) it seems unlikely that non-Chinese NFTs will end up being supported by the government-run market any time soon.
Disclaimer: At the time of writing, the author of this article owned BTC, ETH, and various other cryptocurrencies.
