China to Roll Out State-Backed Exchange for Digital Collectibles

By Andrew Asmakov

The "China Digital Asset Trading Platform," the country's first digital collectibles marketplace, is set to be unveiled on January 1, 2023, with an official ceremony celebrating the launch of the marketplace to be held in Beijing, according to a China Daily report earlier this week.

Designed to be compliant on a national level, the China Digital Assets Exchange is run by the government-backed China Technology Exchange and China Cultural Relics Exchange Center, as well as the Huaban Digital Copyright Service Center, a private corporation.

The new platform will run on an underlying blockchain dubbed “China Cultural Protection Chain,” the China Digital Assets Exchange will facilitate the trading of digital collections, digital copyrights, and property rights.

Per the report, China Cultural Protection Chain is “the only credible depository service platform for tradable digital assets, providing digital asset registration, confirmation of rights, depository, rights protection monitoring, and copyright protection services for institutions and individual users.”

In addition, the platform is partnering with the "Digital Collection Home," the first metaverse digital collection credit evaluation and aggregation platform in China, developed by Zhongrong Global Holdings Co.

This partnership will reportedly give the platform's users access to the metaverse and digital collection-related data, content, and other aggregation services.

Next chapter for China’s NFT sector?

China, which cracked down hard on Bitcoin mining and the broader crypto industry last year, widely uses the term “digital collectibles” to describe what is otherwise known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Earlier this year, China’s state-backed Blockchain Services Network debuted a platform for issuing and selling such tokenized digital collectibles—albeit with no crypto allowed, meaning users have to use Chinese yuan to pay for collectibles and platform fees.

Moreover, the speculative aspect of the digital collectibles sector in China has been pretty much restricted until now, with no secondary trading allowed.

The launch of the China Digital Assets Exchange appears to change that, even though cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum will still not be available.

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