China is reportedly launching its own NFT marketplace on Jan. 1, 2023. This will be the country’s first-ever state-sponsored platform for trading non-fungible tokens.

According to Crypto Briefing, the NFT marketplace was partially built by the China Technology Exchange, which is backed by the government. The CTE is a national technological institution that was jointly put up by the country’s Ministry of Science and Technology, the Beijing Municipal People’s Government, the State Intellectual Property Office, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The site will likely be interoperability between the decentralized blockchains and the Chinese NFT marketplace. In any case, the setting up of the marketplace for digital assets is said to be a follow-up move of the Chinese government on its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) efforts with a state-sponsored NFT platform.

This NFT marketplace is expected to allow trading and various transactions involving digital copyrights, intellectual property rights, as well as digital collections on a blockchain dubbed the China Cultural Security Chain. But despite the use of the CCSC, it will still continue to rely on trading instruments and settlement mechanisms offered by the China Technology Exchange.

It was noted that specific information about the Chinese NFT marketplace is hard to find, but it was confirmed to have the proficiency to enable the secondary trading of digital assets. Moreover, the CCSC is most likely to be centralized, which means that all non-fungible tokens supported by the chain will be the property of the entity that is in control of the chain and not the users, which is unlike the setup with Ethereum and a number of other blockchains.

Meanwhile, the government has arranged a ceremony to celebrate the official launch of the NFT marketplace. It will be held in Beijing on New Year’s Day, which falls on Sunday.

The digital token platform will be operated together by three entities consisting of state-owned and private entities and these are the China Technology Exchange, Art Exhibitions China, and privately-owned Huban Digital, according to CoinDesk.

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