State media warn of ‘huge bubble’ in NFT as cryptocurrencies lose steam in China
- An article in a sister paper of People’s Daily has become the latest state media outlet to question the prospect of non-fungible tokens
- NFTs, built on blockchain, have so far been tolerated in China, where the mining and trading of cryptocurrencies are banned
A Chinese state-run newspaper has warned of a “huge bubble” in non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, just as the country’s Big Tech companies – including Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding – have started to test the water this new digital asset market.
The article published on Friday by the Securities Times, supervised by the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, said that “it is common sense that there is a huge bubble in NFT transactions” and that “many buyers only focus on NFT as a format instead of the artwork or asset itself”.
“Once market enthusiasm wanes and the hype cools, the value of these many strange NFTs will greatly decrease,” wrote author Wang Junhui, a staff reporter.
Collage creator Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, told Fox News in March that he believed the prices of NFT art have been inflated, but the underpinning technology is still valuable.
“I absolutely think [NFT art is] a bubble, to be quite honest. I go back to the analogy of the beginning of the internet. There was a bubble. And the bubble burst,” he said. “But it didn’t wipe out the internet. And so the technology itself is strong enough where I think it’s going to outlive that.”
