- The People’s Bank of China considers it necessary to regulate NFTs in the same way that it already does with digital assets to control and contain money laundering.
- For the moment they have already imposed strict restrictions on the trade of NFT to “reduce the speculative hype.”
How much is a Vincent Van Gogh work of art worth? And an exact replica of your painting? Why did Leonardo Da Vincise’s Salvator Mundi sell for $ 450 million and became the most expensive painting in history in 2017? These questions are currently unanswered. Neither do the prices of NFTs and that worries.
The most valuable non-expendable token belongs to the most prominent artist in the digital universe: Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann and is 40 years old. His work “Everydays – The First 5000 Days” was sold through Christie’s auction house for $ 69 million. Its alot? Is it little? No one can know.
These doubts have turned on the alerts of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) has already set the alarms in this regard. The institution believes that it is necessary to regulate these sectors in the same way that it already does with digital assets to control and contain money laundering. The authorities of the Asian country understand that these high amounts could be paid with illegal money, which is outside the system.
Strict regulation of the crypto market in China
The regulation that the PBoC has is very particular since 2017, a measure that in September of this year it reaffirmed, it prohibited all its citizens from trading any type of cryptocurrency. Therefore, the exchanges that worked there are not enabled to operate, which caused a massive closure and migration of crypto companies in the region.
With NFTs, he has already done something similar by imposing strict restrictions on trade, in his own words, to “reduce the speculative hype.” Those citizens who had thought to bet on their collections were forced to cancel them. The focus is now on the activities of the Metaverse, the new boom in the crypto industry.
The one who spoke this time was the director of the PBoC Anti-Money Laundering Analysis and Monitoring Center, Gou Wenjun. The middle IT Time explained that the highest authority in the sector assured that:
“virtual currencies, NFTs and various elements of the Metaverse have a certain degree of interoperability that can easily become a money laundering tool for criminals“. While adding: “Virtual assets need to be clarified, so regulatory policies for emerging virtual assets need to be improved“.
NFT trading continues
Beyond all the prohibitions and regulations, People’s Daily, a state media outlet, noted that Some of the platforms that operate NFT are in use in China and are used by young people who were born in the 1990s and 2000s with large sums of yuan, the local currency. These actions are risky as they go against “compliance” with the current provision.
Local government bans not only take away freedoms from citizens, but also pose significant obstacles to the progress of leading companies in the technology sector such as Alibaba’s Ant Group, ByteDance’s Tencent and TikTok. Although it is unknown if they were working on Meverso or NFT, all those possible projects will remain an idea for the moment.
China continues with a stance of wanting to scare its population and maintains bans on digital assets. These statements are more than a new excuse to continue with a restrictive stance, which distances itself from the policies of other countries in the world.
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