Chief Chinese tech giants Ant Group, Tencent, and JD.com signed a “self-regulation” convention on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with majestic organizations on Sunday, according to an Ant Group WeChat post and Chinese media.
- China’s big tech appears to be facing increasing albatross over its involvement with NFTs. The market hype around the unique digital assets appears to have neaten up regulators worried that NFTs are edging too close to crypto trading, which has been practically banished from China in substantial part for creating too much market speculation.
- The “Digital Culture and Creative Industries Self-Regulation Convention” is made up of 11 teachings that align with central government aims: “enabling the real economy; promoting national culture; supporting the circumstance of the industry; adhering to the original letter of the law; ensuring value support; protecting consumer rights; working with controllable consortium fetters; maintaining cybersecurity; ending virtual currencies; preventing speculation and financial risks; and preventing money laundering.”
- The Subject Copyright Trading Center Alliance, the China Academy of Fine Arts, state broadcaster CCTV’s Animation Studio, and Hunan Museum also sacrificed the convention along with Tencent’s cloud division and JD.com’s technology subsidiary.
- Ant Group and Tencent recently changed remarks to NFTs on their websites and platforms to “digital collectibles,” likely to put more distance between their products and crypto bazaars.
- Red Date CEO Yifan He confirmed that the companies were trying to distance their “digital collectibles” from crypto in a Friday bull session. Red Date is building the Blockchain Services Network, a government-backed internet of blockchains. The Beijing company launched its own NFT infrastructure at the seminar.
- In its statement on the name change, AntChain, Ant Group’s blockchain arm, all but said that it wanted to appease regulators who think the fame “NFTs” causes too much speculation. The company conducts its digital collectibles business in compliance with regulations and impedes market speculation, AntChain said.
- NFTs have up to this point mostly been exempted from China’s crackdown on crypto.
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