In an effort to separate non-fungible tokens from cryptocurrencies, China plans to roll out infrastructure for NFTs at the end of this month through the state-run Blockchain Services Network (BSN).
He Yifan, a CEO of Red Date Technology, said China will have no legal issues with NFTs as long as it distances itself from cryptocurrencies. The BSN has come up with an infrastructure known as the Distributed Digital Certificate (DDC) to distinguish it from crypto-transacted NFTs. It will offer application programming interfaces (APIs) for businesses or individuals. As such, they would be able to build their portals and apps to manage NFTs.
He believes that in the near future, China will see an annual output of NFTs in billions. Non-fungible tokens are established and traded on public blockchains. These are decentralized platforms. He highlighted that public blockchains are illegal in China. With this in mind, Red Date created a solution called the “open permissioned chain”. This is an adapted version that can be governed by an authorized group. Since its debut in 2018, BSN has localized over 20 public chains.
The executive revealed that the BSN-DDC will integrate 10 chains, including Ethereum and Corda, as well as Fisco Bcos which has been initiated by WeBank, a Tencent-backed fintech firm. The new infrastructure can disrupt the current industry. He said because of its potential, the infrastructure has already gained over 20 partners, including the Cosmos blockchain network, Baiwang and Sumavision. He added that BSN-DDC is harmonious across chains and cheaper. Issuing an NFT through this infrastructure will be much cheaper, about 0.7 US cents, than other chains.
NFTs are not illegal in China but because of compliance reasons some Big Tech companies have labeled their NFT projects as “digital collectibles”. Chinese companies, namely, Ant Group and Tecent Holdings were among the first to embrace NFTs. JD and Baidu have launched their digital collectibles, and so has state-run media Xinhua News Agency.
