Shanghai residents are turning to blockchain to preserve memories of the city’s month-long COVID-19 lockdown, capturing videos, photos and artifacts as non-fungible tokens to ensure they shareable and avoid deletion.
Unable to leave their homes for a week, many of the city’s 25 million residents are venting their frustrations online, sharing stories of hardship, and difficulties in procuring food, about harsh lockdown restrictions. are, such as patients unable to receive medical treatment.
This has intensified the cat-and-mouse game with Chinese censors vowing to step up policing of the Internet and group chats, which they describe as rumors and inciting public frustration with the lockdown. Try to stop the attempts.
While some people continue to repost this kind of content, others are turning to NFT Markets like the world’s largest, open seaWhere users can mint content and buy or sell it using cryptocurrencyAttracts from the fact that the data recorded on the blockchain is untraceable.
The height of Shanghai’s lockdown minting moment lies on April 22, when netizens battled censors overnight for sharing a six-minute video titled “The Voice of April”, a rendition of voices recorded during Shanghai’s outbreak. There was a collection.
As of Monday, 786 separate items related to the video can be found on OpenSee, along with hundreds of other NFTs related to the lockdown in Shanghai.
On April 23, a Chinese Twitter user with the handle imFong said in a widely retweeted post, “I have nifted the ‘Voice of April’ video and froze its metadata. This video is always on IPFS.” Will be there for you.” For interplanetary file system, a type of distributed network.
Like most major foreign social media and news platforms, Twitter is blocked in China, although residents can access it using a VPN.
A Shanghai programmer told Reuters he was among those in the city who watched the video as part of his attempt to keep the people alive.
He himself built the NFT based on the screenshots from Shanghai covid The lockdown map, showing how much of the city has been sealed off from the outside world.
“Stuck at home because of the outbreak takes me a lot of time,” he said on condition of anonymity.
Other Shanghai content available as NFTs for sale on OpenC includes Weibo posts containing complaints about restrictions, images of quarantine centers inside and works of art inspired by life under lockdown.
Simon Fong, a 49-year-old freelance designer from Malaysia who has been living in Shanghai for nine years, began creating a satirical take on life under lockdown in the style of a Mao-era propaganda poster.
He started pouring them into NFTs since late last year after he dominated the market, and has now managed to sell nine of his actions at an average price of 0.1. ether ($290).
His pieces include PCR tests as well as visuals showing residents’ demand for government rations.
“I chose the Mao-era propaganda style for these pieces because some people are saying that the lockdown situation is holding Shanghai back,” Fong said.
While China has banned cryptocurrency trading, it sees blockchain as a promising technology and NFTs are gaining traction in the country, which has been recognized by state media outlets and even companies including Ant Group and Tencent Holdings. Adopted by tech companies.
The lengthy lockdown in China’s financial hub, Shanghai, is a party to Beijing’s controversial zero-COVID strategy, a policy that has increased risks to its economy.
The COVID outbreak in Shanghai that began in March has been the worst in China since the pandemic’s initial months in 2020. Hundreds of thousands of people have been infected in the city.