Regulations and low quality in the Chinese digital scene has led the brightest of the nation’s crypto-artists to pin their hopes on international markets
The bubble burst after barely three weeks.
In late April this year, a new platform named iBox surfaced on Apple’s China App Store, trading in Chinese Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Some users, attracted by stories of million-dollar sales and celebrity purchases of NFTs last year, and noting that the platform allowed them to re-sell, bought at lightning speed.
The products, simple digital images based on classical Chinese culture, sold at prices that inflated dramatically over a short period of time. A simple cartoon NFT of the Monkey King poised to strike a demon increased from 99 yuan to 31,588 yuan over 13 days.
But prices began to drop sharply on May 15, leaving investors (many of whom were university students) with huge losses, a lot of anger, and some fairly uninteresting pictures.
Alex Colville is the former culture editor at The World of Chinese. Blown to China by the tides of curiosity, then marooned here by the squalls of Covid, Alex used to write for 1843, The Economist, and the Spectator from the confines of a cold London flat. When he’s not writing for TWOC, he can be found researching his bi-weekly column for SupChina from the confines of his freezing Beijing hutong.
