NFTs are increasingly popular in China’s art world, but their dubious legal status may stop them from taking off
By day, Eminem Guo is a worker at a state-owned enterprise in Shenzhen. But after hours, he’s selling on a black market. Together with other anonymous Chinese internet users, “Kelly” and “Marktim,” he has set up “Tiger Club,” an account selling digital art as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) on sales platform OpenSea.
Although NFTs are technically banned in China, there is huge interest in the country: Chinese servers dominated global Google searches on NFTs in 2021 according to Google Trends. Some are tapping into the action covertly, seeking untold riches potentially just a VPN connection away.
NFTs are a complicated subject—in a nutshell, they are usually a digital image that is assigned value by being unique. They can be traded digitally, as long as they are attached to a cryptocurrency, like Ethereum (ETH) or Bitcoin, which keep records of all exchanges to guarantee against fraud or forgery.
A Token Project: Can NFT Art Flourish in China? is a story from our issue, “State of The Art.” To read the entire issue, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine. Alternatively, you can purchase the digital version from the App Store.