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Whilst China has refrained from fully embracing the NFT industry, companies and regions across the country have been launching their own trading platform under the supervision of Beijing.
In January, China’s state-backed Blockchain Services Network (BSN) held a soft launch of a nationwide infrastructure to support Chinese NFTs. The initiative separated the global NFT market with China’s and was not associated with cryptocurrencies.
Concerned that NFTs could “easily become money-laundering tools”, Chinese state officials stance on the digital assets is that there may be a need to regulate these sectors in the same manner it polices crypto assets.
Tencent subsequently placed a blanket ban on secondary market transfers, whilst Weibo enforced internal KYC checks on its own NFT marketplace TopHolder.
Now, Sichuan is working on an NFT trading platform to “encourage the music industry to actively adopt modern technology.”
Sichuan has been described as a “hotbed of modern Chinese music” with the industry growing 14.09% year-on-year. Music companies in the region are adopting blockchain technology to safeguard copyrights. Sichuan’s NFT trading platform could be used to further secure the rights of musicians and their IPs. The insular nature of China’s NFT market can enable a unified system of securing and recognising these IPs.
The region’s NFT platform is being developed by a local blockchain company according to reports.
Unlike NFT markets around the world, holders of the digital assets in China are not exposed to a secondary market. Thus the recognised economic ecosystem of NFTs is not shared by China. However, by utilising NFTs for other purposes such as copyrights and legal documents, China is demonstrating the wider use of NFTs.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also recently said it had plans to mint and sell digital assets to “spread China’s industrial culture” whilst expressing an interest in building an “industrial metaverse service platform”.
Last week, China state broadcaster Shandong Television announced it was planning to build its own blockchain infrastructure to support NFTs whilst developing “a series of metaverse products.”
