Shanghai Residents Pour Their Money Into NFT Collections

Shanghai residents are staying in lockdown and as they get bored, they pour their money into NFT collections amid a hefty censorship regime so let’s read more today in our latest cryptocurrency news.

The Shanghai residents are pouring their money into NFT collection while in lockdown and are looking for novel ways to vent their frustration over the country’s zero-tolerance COVID policies. One of them was Simon Fong, a 49-year-old freelance designer from Malaysia that lived in Shanghai for the past nine years. He started creating satirical illustrations that show life under lockdown and took inspiration from the Mao-era propaganda posters. His artwork included scenes mocking PCR testing procedures as well as residents’ demands for government food rations:

“I chose the Mao-era propaganda style for these pieces because some people are saying that the lockdown situation is taking Shanghai backward.”

我把《四月之声》的视频mint成了 NFT，并且freeze了metadata。此视频将永远存在IPFS上。https://t.co/NzFURqrFH3 via @opensea

— KCPT.GM (@imFong) April 22, 2022

The posters were created at the start of April and can be found on the NFT marketplace OpenSea as a collection dubbed “propaganda.”  The collection description noted:

“In each artwork, there is a unique story inspired by true events which have happened, but most are added with a dash of humor.”

Fong said his favorite piece from the collection will is the one entitled “Stay Negative”:

“It’s simple and very straightforward. It has kind of like hidden meaning behind it. It depends on how one interprets it because in normal days before COVID, people ask you to stay positive.”

To date, Fong sold ten items on the NFT series for an average piece of 0.1 ETH each and other Shanghai residents turned to blockcahin technology and expressed their discontent. A video called “The Voice of April” showed a recording of a video of people’s voices hearing shouting and crying from their homes:

“Chinese people are indignant and in great sorrow because we just don’t understand why a video that just recorded the facts(the resources are all from the call records or videos of Shanghai citizens) got banned. It wasn’t against any laws or regulations. The author didn’t even show his/her views and the only words form him/her is at the last of the video.”

The Chinese user going under the KCPT.GM later took it to Twitter to say the video had been turned into the NFT and is available on OpenSea. While china banned crypto trading and BTC mining and still sees blockchain as a promising technology paying special attention to the NFT space but with a twist.