Before the country’s crypto crackdown damages the local NFT business, China plans to draw a clear distinction between cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), much as it did with its digital currency effort.
The Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN), a government-backed blockchain project in China, I working to design an infrastructure which would support people and organizations to build apps and platforms for operating NFTs, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
The project, officially known as the BSN-Distributed Digital Certificate (BSN-DDC), aims to facilitate the development of non-crypto NFTs by giving application programming interfaces for the development of user portals and apps that accept fiat money (national currencies) as the only form of payment.
Yifan, the CEO of BSN tech support company Red Date Technology, emphasized that NFTs are legal in China as long as they are not used with Bitcoin (BTC) or other cryptocurrencies. He stated that, to enable an on-chain governing body the next architecture would use an open permissioned blockchain.
He told a blog website that “public chains can’t be legally run within China,” and that “a trustworthy, low-cost infrastructure is critically required to host all NFTs in China”. According to the executive, NFTs can only be deployed on “unreliable” private chains in the country without a specific nationwide NFT infrastructure.
Red Date aims to set up a legal NFT platform that is totally separated from the regular profile of crypto by allowing a single authority to oversee the infrastructure and intervene in the event of illegal actions.
Red Date is working with all DDC project partners to make the network as transparent as possible while following to Chinese regulations and laws, he said. On the BSN-DDC network, all gas fees are paid using fiat currency.
“We will provide services to NFT companies in Hong Kong, which means if there is any international business involving issuing NFTs inside China, they definitely can choose to use the BSN-DDC network via our Hong Kong gateway.”
BSN’s NFT infrastructure is supported by state-owned China Mobile, China UnionPay, and the State Information Centre. According to Him, the BSN-DDC will combine ten blockchains, including an adapted version of Ethereum, Corda, and WeBank’s Fisco Bcos.
Turkish Chinese Business Matching Center, a Turkish consulting firm, and Red Date Technology entered into an agreement last year to develop two international BSN portals in Turkey and Uzbekistan.
To read our blog on Wikipedia editors vote against classifying NFTs as art, click here.