Big manufacturers get together and enter the game, what is the way for domestic NFT to survive?
Original Author: Si Linwei
Original source: Jiemian News
"NFT" has become hot.
The bay of Singapore is an alluring azure blue, but Lei Ming (pseudonym) is only focused on the monitor in front of him. As the company's chief designer, he was called from Beijing to Singapore a month ago to take charge of a major project - designing a set of NFT for the company.
Although Lei Ming has rich experience in design, it is the first time that he has received an NFT-related demand. As a design post, Lei Ming at this time actually doesn't quite understand what "NFT" is, only knowing that it was originally related to the blockchain. But after working overtime for a month, he only sighed: "This thing is really hot."
However, Xiaolei (pseudonym), who is in charge of the risk control business, has a different feeling. He has a different style from the business line. He needs to consider more about the hidden dangers that NFT will plant for the company.
Xiaolei said that while feeling the popularity of NFT, he felt more worried in his heart. At the moment when the regulatory policy is not yet clear, he can only remind colleagues in the business line over and over again during meetings to act cautiously and take risk control measures in advance.
According to incomplete statistics from Jiemian News, Ant Group, Tencent, JD.com, Baidu, NetEase, and Bilibili have all entered the NFT field. In the ups and downs of 2021, NFT has quietly become a new track where giants gather.
But whether this is a new outlet with a closed commercial loop, or a short-lived bubble in nothingness, no one knows at present.
The first year of NFT: institutions follow suit, celebrities stand on the platform
Like all new things, for most people, NFT is a "don't know" thing.
Strictly speaking, NFT is one of the derivative applications of blockchain technology. Around 2017, it was born in the world's largest blockchain ecosystem, Ethereum.
At that time, when the Ethereum network was being upgraded, someone proposed a new proposal "ERC-721". This protocol allows each token in the blockchain network to have a unique blockchain hash value, so that each Each token is unique, so "Non-Fungible Tokens" appeared. It has many Chinese translations, such as "non-fungible tokens", "non-fungible tokens" and so on.
Within the Chinese context, it can be understood as a tool that provides uniqueness and ownership certificates for digital content.
If you have to sum up NFT in one sentence, it is "NFT realizes the scarcity of digital content in computer language".
In 2021, NFT will go out of the circle around the world, becoming one of the most out-of-the-box applications of blockchain technology. And this is beyond the imagination of many people. Not only outsiders, but even Vtalik, the founder of Ethereum, the world's largest blockchain ecosystem, admitted that he had neglected the growth of NFT.
On March 11, 2021, some people think that this day should be recorded in art history. On that day, Christie’s auctioned the painting of encryption artist Beeple at a price of 69.34 million U.S. dollars, and this little-known artist became the top three in the auction list of paintings by living artists. The most special thing about this painting is that, It is an NFT.
This became the first moment for NFT to go out of the circle in the world. Since then, "Time" magazine in the media industry has released news NFTs, entertainment giant Disney has released NFTs of Spider-Man IP, and even fashion giant Louis Vuitton has put NFTs as one of the easter eggs in commemoration when celebrating its centenary Activity.
NFT began to spread all over the world and occupied people's social media avatars. The second wave of avatars is the avatar NFT. People find that the avatars of social media are a natural display window and have the most direct social effect, so they use "Cryptopunks" and "BYAC" as the The representative avatar NFT has attracted another wave of attention around the world. The former is a strange avatar with 10,000 pixel styles, and the latter is a bunch of ugly monkeys.
At this time, celebrities and KOLs around the world have also begun to join this trend. From the legendary American rapper Eminem to the NBA superstar Stephen Curry, various stars have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to change their profile pictures to NFT pictures.
When the wind blows to the Chinese music scene, Jay Chou, JJ Lin, and Wilber Pan have all become holders of "NFT".
Until today, if you pay close attention, you will find that the WeChat avatars of many trendy men and women have also turned into ugly monkeys. NFT has gradually expanded from a technology to a "meme" in Dawkins' mouth. A cultural factor capable of self-replication and retransmission.
The hot big factory: get in together and sell out in seconds
Naturally, major domestic manufacturers will not miss this wave. In 2021, Ant Group will be the first to eat crabs.
Ant Group has been deeply involved in the blockchain field for many years, with the support of its blockchain network AntChain. On June 23, Alipay released a batch of "NFT" version of the payment code skin. Each NFT is limited to 8,000 copies, and the price is 10 Alipay points + 9.9 yuan. It is snapped up in two batches every day. As soon as the event was released, the NFTs for sale were sold out.
With the rising popularity of the activity, sky-high prices for buying and selling NFTs have appeared on second-hand platforms such as Xianyu. Even scalpers have begun to enter and post directly on Xianyu: "High price recovery of Alipay NFT Dunhuang Fine Arts Research Institute NFT number 0001 or 6666 , 100,000 pieces, and 500 pieces for other numbers."
The screenshots posted on the Internet show that the highest price of the same NFT of Xianyu has reached 1.5 million yuan. The next day, Xianyu officials quickly removed all NFT products from the shelves, and Ant Group also issued an official notice emphasizing that it would not give any room for hype.
But the huge energy generated by NFT has really exceeded everyone's expectations. Ant Group tested the water, and Tencent quickly followed.
Different from the more uniform style of Ant Group, Tencent's layout still follows the amoeba strategy and encourages internal teams to innovate. Around August, two teams from within Tencent released news that NFT will be launched soon.
On July 30, QQ Music announced that it will launch the NFT encrypted art service "TME Digital Collection", issue virtual collections to users, and start internal testing. The subsequent platform technology may be launched simultaneously in various products in TME.
On August 2, the "Magic Core", which is known as the first NFT trading platform in China, was officially launched on the APP. This product is from the Tencent PCG business group.
From the current point of view, the layout of Magic Core is faster. Its first NFT collection is based on the well-known video talk show "Thirteen Invitations", named "Limited Edition Thirteen Invitations Vinyl Record NFT", with a total of 300 pieces , priced at RMB 18, was sold out instantly when it went on sale.
QQ Music followed closely. On August 9, QQ Music launched its first music digital collection - Hu Yanbin's 20th anniversary vinyl NFT "The Monk". The album was limited to 2,001 copies, and the number of pre-orders exceeded 40,000.
Obviously, not only users and collectors, but also developers and creators, many people have underestimated the charm of NFT.
Three months later, the young team from PCG, Magic Core, took care of the NFT collection distributed only to internal employees for the 23rd anniversary of Tencent. Harvested the first NFT in life.
With the entry of the two giants, major Internet companies have made efforts.
With the strong support of Ant Group, digital collection activities of Tmall and Taobao have continued one after another. In December, digital collections finally appeared on JD.com APP. On December 17, Jiemian News learned that JD.com’s NFT distribution platform "Lingxi" has launched a small program in JD.com APP. The first batch of JD.com mascot "Joy" The NFT of the design prototype sold out quickly.
On the other hand, Bilibili, which was revealed to be testing the blockchain scene on December 6, released a batch of avatar-like NFTs a month later. It is reported that this series of avatars is not for sale, and users need to sign up. The condition is that Bilibili users The total number of users who have reached level 6 and use Bilibili every day throughout 2021 is 2,233.
Netease, which is a little slower, has not only released NFT for its game "Infinity", but its NetEase Odaily will also start recruiting relevant talents for NFT platform construction in the second half of 2021. The latest version of the Netease Odaily APP has also introduced digital collections on the inner page.
An insider of Netease Odaily told Jiemian News that the Netease Odaily digital collection platform is one of the basic scenarios of its Metaverse business, providing IP parties with a complete set of brand solutions such as digital collection contract casting, product marketing, and user management. It also provides collectors with services such as secondary creation, exchange, purchase, gift, and collection and sharing of digital collections. The digital collections that will be launched soon include: random blind boxes, interesting videos, 3D models, etc., and the content itself is selected.
The running entry of major domestic manufacturers has added a new dimension to the popularity of NFT.
Concerns of major manufacturers: Quietly changing name, strangling secondary transactions
But behind Dachang's fiery test of NFT, there is a bit of caution hidden.
An insider of QQ Music told Jiemian News that regarding the NFT business, the team had hesitated a few times and did not dare to try too much.
After releasing the NFT, the first thing the big factory did was to change its name. On October 23, Jiemian News learned that on the inside pages of the Alipay mini-program "Ant Vermicelli" and Tencent's NFT distribution platform "Magic Core", the words "NFT" all disappeared and changed to "Digital Collection".
At the same time, after the deletion of the word NFT in the platform, the definition and introduction of digital collections have all been updated, with special emphasis on the difference from virtual currencies, and only the scarcity endowed by blockchain technology is retained.
This time the name change was relatively sudden, there was no notice when the name was changed, and there is no clear statement so far.
However, the major Internet companies that have entered the market since then, including platforms such as JD.com, Station B, NetEase, and Xiaohongshu, have emphasized that they are digital collections, and rarely see NFT words. When introducing related products, they have also emphasized that they are related to Different virtual currencies.
The second is to strangle secondary transactions. Due to my country's strict supervision of virtual currency, many departments will clear and prohibit virtual currency mining and trading in 2021, and NFT itself also has token attributes, which is in a very embarrassing situation. Location.
Therefore, major domestic manufacturers choose to shield their financial attributes, the most critical of which is to prohibit secondary transactions. Since Alipay launched NFT in June, its hype has caused the development team to have some concerns, and the rapid delisting of Xianyu has extinguished the greed of many speculators.
However, Xianyu's actions are only "treating the symptoms", and the root is still in "whether it can be traded", which is the root of its financial attributes. So the big manufacturers started to start from this aspect.
An unnamed person from a large factory told Jiemian News that since the key to NFT hype lies in transactions, not opening transactions has become a prerequisite for compliance, and domestic alliance chains are also different from public chains, and they cannot interact freely. .
Therefore, after careful weighing, never letting go of secondary transactions has become the bottom line for major domestic manufacturers to test digital collections.
Since the launch of the business, Ant Group has emphasized in many responses that it rejects virtual currency hype and does not support users to conduct transactions.
But if the circulation of the collection is not given, its value will naturally be greatly reduced. Therefore, on balance, the digital collections under the Ant Group are only open to the transfer function, and need to be held for more than 180 days. Buyers must pass real-name authentication and bind identity information.
Such strict measures are to eliminate the risk of related hype, and all major manufacturers including Tencent and JD.com have chosen the same strategy. The first step is only to open the purchase or collection function, and must complete real-name authentication and hold it for a certain period of time Later, the transfer function will be opened one after another.
Whether it is changing the name from NFT to "digital collection", or blocking the transaction function, and delaying the launch of the "transfer" function, behind the hot sell-out of NFT by major manufacturers, every action is cautious.
Under such circumstances, each company has a scene for the NFT business: just do it and don't talk about it.
Taking Ant Group as an example, with the vigorous development of the digital collection business, the brand carrier of the Alipay mini-program "AntChain Vermicelli" has been upgraded to "Whale Explorer", which is an independent APP and has already been launched in major App store, but Ant Group did not make a big publicity for the launch of "Whale Explorer".
The same is true of JD.com. Its digital collection business "Lingxi" requires users to index in the search box to enter. Station B uses a newly registered official account to publish information in the dynamics, and the same is true for Xiaohongshu.
It is not difficult to see that each company has set the entrance interaction of the collections in a less conspicuous way. Apart from the fact that NFT itself is not the core business, it also implies a low-key work.
Out of concerns about regulation, and due to the sensitivity of new NFT-related businesses, major manufacturers tacitly chose to remain silent, including Tencent, JD.com, and Bilibili, and they don’t want to talk about this business in the general environment of 2021 , In addition to the necessary response, the big manufacturers have not invested much publicity resources.
The future of domestic NFT
According to Nonfungible data, the global transaction volume of NFT in the latest week reached about 544 million U.S. dollars, and the average transaction price of NFT reached about 2,400 U.S. dollars per piece.
At the same time, incubated by YC, OpenSea, the world's largest NFT trading platform, has a valuation of 13 billion US dollars, and this is only a small company that was founded five years ago. According to data from dappradar, the total transaction volume of OpenSea has exceeded 20 billion US dollars, setting a record high.
However, almost all of these NFT transactions occur in the public blockchain network. For large domestic manufacturers, the market size and valuation are only a literal reference, without strategic help. However, domestic digital collections started later, and there is no complete market statistics yet.
In fact, from the perspective of commercial closed-loop, there is no problem with the development logic of digital collections. The combination of blockchain technology + cultural and creative IP is the core gameplay in China at present. The issuer provides IP resources, and the distribution platform provides technical support. Collectors do this pay.
At present, many large domestic companies with blockchain technology development capabilities, such as Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, also have massive IP resources, which can directly take into account the roles of issuers and technical support. The biggest feature of the digital collection business is Can generate some cash flow.
However, the biggest proposition that determines the domestic NFT is whether its development can be regulated. Due to its own financial attributes, supervision is the core of everything.
He Yifan, executive director of the BSN Development Alliance and CEO of Jujube Technology, who focuses on the implementation of domestic NFT compliance, told Jiemian News that the key to the development of domestic NFT is how the issuer controls the attributes of NFT. Domestically, when it comes to financial attributes, there will be strong supervision on this. If it is defined as a virtual commodity, it will be developed according to the rules of virtual commodity operation. "At the same time, it also depends on whether the financial risk prevention measures are in place." He Yifan added.
So how to find a way out of compliance under the background of the explosion of the global NFT market may be the way to survive for the digital collections of major domestic manufacturers.
