NEAR Protocol teams up with a Chinese artist to sell NFTs in Alibaba’s E-Commerce Website Taobao’s Maker Festival.
NEAR Protocol is collaborating with Web3Games, a blockchain gaming company, and Chinese artist Heshan Huang to sell his non-fungible token (NFT)-based “real estate” at Alibaba’s Taobao Maker Festival this year.
The festival was founded in 2016 by Alibaba-owned Taobao, one of China’s major e-commerce websites, to encourage young Chinese artists and entrepreneurs to exhibit their work and sell it on the platform.
The festival will take place from July 17 to July 25 at Shanghai’s National Exhibition and Convention Center.
NFTs, which are mostly built on decentralized public chains with native coins, appear to have escaped China’s new crypto crackdown. In April, a major gallery in Beijing presented a crypto-art exhibition when the country was shutting down crypto mining and trading operations.
According to NEAR, this year’s Taobao Maker Festival will be the first to integrate NFTs. According to Huang, buyers would be able to place their orders on Taobao and pay in renminbi, the local Chinese currency.
To claim their NFT digital art, interested buyers must visit a link and register for a NEAR wallet, according to the business.
Huang’s digital artworks are housed in a virtual complex where visitors can purchase his distinctively formed NFT structures. This isn’t the first time an Alibaba-affiliated company has dabbled in NFTs.
In May, Alipay, a subsidiary of Alibaba, launched two digital art pieces based on NFT. Owners of the paintings will be able to view them on the payment tab of their Alipay app anytime they make a purchase. Within hours, 16,000 copies had been sold out.
Alipay explained shortly after the sale that NFTs are not cryptocurrencies and hence cannot be traded at a substantially higher price.