Communist Youth League latest to embrace NFT craze
The Communist Youth League, a cradle for generations of mainland leaders, has embraced non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to mark its 100th anniversary, issuing 54,000 free “digital collectibles” yesterday.
They featured the league’s official mascot Tuanbao, a white, round animated face with two communist stars on the head.
The tokens, built on a blockchain developed by Hangzhou Shunwang Technology, were all taken up within an hour. As with other digital collectibles in the mainland’s closed NFT market, theys are not allowed to be traded.
The issuance came on Youth Day, celebrated annually on May 4 as a tribute to student demonstrations in 1919 against the Treaty of Versailles after the first world war, when Chinese territory held by the Germans was given to Japan.
Separately, Peking University issued 20,000 digital collectibles in the form of alumni cards to commemorate May 4 as well as the school’s 124th anniversary.
NFTs, digital assets built on the blockchain, are attracting the attention of a rising number of state-backed organisations as well as privately held technology firms.
The official Xinhua News Agency jumped on the bandwagon last December when it gave away more than 100,000 digital collectibles featuring news photos from “historical moments in 2021”.
Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, and social media and gaming giant Tencent Holdings were the first tech giants to embrace NFTs, launching dozens of products since last summer. JD.com and Baidu followed with their own digital collectibles. Alibaba owns the Post.
However, the companies have been careful to discourage potential speculation. In March, Tencent’s WeChat app froze multiple accounts that marketed digital collectibles. A WeChat representative said at the time the platform had enforced “regulation and rectification on public accounts and mini programs that speculate on or resell digital collectibles”.
Around the same time, Ant Group’s digital collectible platform Topnod punished 56 accounts for participating in the resale of digital collectibles for profit. In January, more than 300 accounts were punished for using plug-ins and scripts to snap up digital collectibles.
Last month, three government-managed financial associations jointly released guidelines to prohibit the use of NFTs in the issuance of securities, insurance, loans and precious metals.