China’s Ant Group highlighted the distinction between NFTs and cryptocurrency after its successful sales of digital art.
Ant put on sale 16,000 copies of NFT-backed app images via its payment platform Alipay and all the items quickly sold out on Wednesday. But at the same time, Ant’s adoption of NFTs caused confusion on social media where they were related to virtual currencies like bitcoin, which have the same underlying technology.
Source: Antgroup
This prompted the Ant Group to clarify that non-fungible tokens are not cryptocurrencies.
"NFT is not interchangeable, nor divisible, making it different by nature from cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin," commented a spokesperson at AntChain,
reported Reuter. Non-fungible tokens(NFTs) can be used to create a unique signature for digital assets, he added.
Jack Ma-controlled Ant Group's swift response seems to be related to China’s intensifying crackdowns on crypto trading and mining. It is worth noting that China in last few months has intensified a campaign against crypto-trading and mining, as part of efforts to fend off financial risks.
Alipay’s adoption of NFTs can become significant since it offers Chinese buyers with a channel to pay for NFT artwork with local fiat currency renminbi. On the other hand the artwork on decentralized public chains like Ethereum would have to be paid with native tokens. China started cracking down on fiat-to-crypto trading in 2017.