China’s State-Run Xinhua Media Agency To Issue NFTs

Key Points:

Xinhua will release NFTs this Friday, in an apparent contradiction of the Chinese government’s anti-crypto stance.

The official state-run press agency of China, Xinhua has said today that it plans to issue a series of NFTs for free on Christmas Eve at 12pm UTC via it’s news app.

The drop will comprise 11 different collections of photojournalism, numbered to 10,000 copies each, and one “special edition” collection, each recording “many precious historical moments of 2021.”

Historic moments celebrated in the new collection include the Chinese Communist Party’s centenary celebration in Tiananmen Square and the nation’s milestone of having administered over 2.7 billion vaccine doses.
This news is contradictory to the stance China has taken against cryptocurrency; this year Chinese authorities have cracked down on crypto businesses in the country, sending shockwaves through global markets.

The price of Bitcoin and the overall crypto market crashed back in May after China doubled down on it’s 2017 ban on transactions via blockchain.

By mid-summer, Chinese authorities had begun shuttering mining operations within the country's borders, cutting power on at least 26 mining farms in Sichuan province alone.

 Since then, Chinese crypto miners have relocated abroad, while the U.S. has become the world's largest Bitcoin mining market—while Bitcoin's mining hash rate has recovered from its summer slump.

Despite the Chinese government's negative stance on crypto, the country's investors have poured money into the emerging 'metaverse', a drive to create shared virtual worlds that's expected to be underpinned by crypto and NFTs.