How do top collectors view the differences between Chinese and international NFT markets?
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How do top collectors view the differences between Chinese and international NFT markets?
Chinese communities have their own unique characteristics, yet they are closely connected with global communities.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights"OGtown" is an authorized article column by the Chinese-speaking CryptoPunks community.
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Guest Introduction for This Episode
88punk (punk8306): Chen Xu, founder of MetaZ – a metaverse think tank, former Co-Publisher of Coindesk China, and a Chinese OG in the Punks scene.
Token First Brother (punk1778): Researcher focused on the blockchain industry since 2016. Author of mainland China’s first best-selling NFT book. Co-founder of the Chinese-speaking CryptoPunk community and founder of the token punk community.
Noun_74 (noun74): Founder of the Chinese-speaking Cryptopunks community and creator of the Noun Chinese ecosystem community; has incubated and mentored multiple Chinese NFT projects to reach global audiences.
Jennie (punk1369): Holder of CryptoPunks and Nouns, entered the industry in 2018 focusing on Web3.0 infrastructure, Layer2, and NFT investments. NFT Native | Holder of CloneX, Doodles, BAYC.
Blue Star from Element Market: Community Director at Element Market.
Featured Community: nounsDAO, a top-tier global DAO community with a treasury holding nearly 30,000 ETH.
Opening Remarks:
Noun74: Today we're visiting the nounsDAO community to discuss similarities and differences between the Chinese and international NFT markets.
I’d like to start by discussing the stark contrasts between the Chinese Nouns community and the global Nouns community. These differences are common across regions. The Chinese community has its own unique characteristics, yet remains deeply interconnected with the global community. Currently, there's a growing sentiment within the international Nouns community advocating for reduced treasury spending, which reflects some internal division. I believe having diverse voices within a DAO is absolutely healthy—it demonstrates the nature of DAO governance and embodies decentralization. However, I also believe that whether it's a DAO or any centralized product, there must be a core philosophy. Decentralization doesn't mean swinging directions daily—east one day, west the next. Instead, there should be a consistent vision: why we do what we do, and what principles and culture guide us. That foundation should remain unchanged. The original purpose of establishing the Nouns treasury was never to benchmark book value, but to use the treasury to build the brand.
One final point about the Chinese versus international NFT markets: China’s market potential is enormous—with 1.4 billion people, fewer than one in 100,000 currently access the global internet and NFT markets via tools like VPNs. In China, setting up private VPNs is illegal and can lead to prison sentences of at least three years. Most Chinese users rely on such unauthorized channels to access the global internet. Therefore, if Nouns wants to truly promote itself in China, the key lies in finding a legally compliant way to engage the Chinese market—only then could it possibly reach the domestic population of 1.4 billion.
Q&A Session: What are the similarities and differences between the Chinese and overseas NFT markets?
Token First Brother (punk1778): The contrast is significant. To make an awkward analogy, the Chinese NFT market is like a eunuch—technically male, but castrated. The primary reason lies with regulatory policy. Culturally, China follows the doctrine of the mean, so innovation naturally lags behind Western countries. Under this cultural context, the current state is understandable. Our NFTs are called "digital collectibles." With Tencent’s digital collectible platform shutting down and numerous WeChat official accounts being banned, the domestic digital collectible space is under strict oversight—even without explicit bans.
This situation brings both drawbacks and advantages. The downside is that we must forge a uniquely Chinese path for NFTs—one that avoids sensitive areas like financial security. Regulators are primarily concerned about financial stability, potentially mistaking NFTs for FTs (fungible tokens) and fearing systemic risks. While NFTs pose far less threat to financial stability than FTs, regulation in China remains stricter compared to abroad.
Based on my past experience, efforts to empower traditional enterprises through blockchain have not been promising. A few years ago, I participated in several so-called "token transformations" and "blockchain integrations," all of which ultimately failed. Many tried to apply blockchain concepts to traditional businesses with great ambition, but results proved otherwise.
toady_hawk: That’s an interesting perspective. In the U.S., we also distinguish between digital collectibles and NFTs—but our distinction is for marketing purposes, not political ones.
Token First Brother (punk1778): Over the past three years, attempts to empower traditional enterprises using tokens have proven unsuccessful. Now, similar efforts are underway using NFTs, but I remain skeptical. That’s the drawback. On the upside, this environment has built a large pool of Web3-aware individuals in China. Once regulations ease, this latent user base—though perhaps cynically viewed as “a reserve of韭菜 (speculative investors)”—could rapidly activate. So there are trade-offs.
88punk (punk8306) Chen Xu: There are two ways to analyze the Chinese market. First, consider it as a market where Chinese consumers spend overseas—like tourists traveling abroad, staying in hotels, shopping, and dining. This describes the behavior of many Chinese participants today, including many punks here. It’s essentially overseas consumption or investment—a distinct market segment.
The second market is domestically produced and consumed. As Token First Brother mentioned, this market is incomplete. Currently, it only supports one-way sales of small digital images, lacking a fully compliant secondary trading market. Strictly speaking, it’s not a complete market. Globally, NFTs—or even digital collectibles before them—may come with certain usage restrictions, but markets allow various operations, especially secondary, tertiary, and repeated resales. That’s inherent to goods. But such functionality doesn’t exist in China.
From this perspective, I draw two conclusions. First, overseas projects hold a strong advantage due to the nature of the Chinese market. There is already significant interest—and growing potential demand—from Chinese users, including everyone here today. Yet their options for investment, consumption, or assets they perceive as both consumable and investable, are limited to overseas projects. This creates a favorable environment for international initiatives.
Second, does this mean domestic Chinese projects have no chance? As former co-publisher of Coindesk China, I’ve observed the Chinese market long-term. For China, the key isn’t risk magnitude—given the government’s strong control capabilities, risks are generally manageable. When considering policy relaxation, the government weighs potential benefits. For a market of China’s size, if the benefit is high enough, the associated risk becomes negligible in comparison.
In the case of cryptocurrencies, my observation and conclusion have been that the benefits to China aren’t substantial. Creating virtual or digital currencies challenges existing fiat systems—especially non-internationalized currencies like the RMB—posing significant risks.
But NFTs are different. They represent China’s best opportunity to unlock digital assets. They consume minimal energy and are environmentally clean—aligned with national development goals. Second, they can unleash China’s rich IP resources, many of which—such as the Forbidden City and Dunhuang—are state-owned.
Therefore, from the Chinese government’s standpoint, opening this market offers 99 benefits to 1 drawback. Opening it is inevitable. The Chinese market will eventually seize this opportunity—the timing remains uncertain, but I believe it’s coming. Thank you.
Jennie (punk1369): Regarding the Chinese and overseas markets, I’ll divide my thoughts into two parts: one concerning Chinese-majority NFT marketplaces, and the other platform-based models, mostly aligned with digital collectibles. You can understand China’s current NFT market—as tied to platforms—as operating more like a Web2 or traditional internet platform, primarily centered around auctioning NFTs or art collectibles. This is largely what the Chinese market discusses when referring to NFTs—a phase shaped by policy, institutional frameworks, or management practices, as previous speakers noted.
However, for Chinese communities and builders, much activity is now happening proactively in Web3 ecosystems worldwide—not just in New York or Singapore, but across Europe, Southeast Asia, and beyond, where Chinese teams and individuals are actively building.
A friend runs a leading domestic digital collectible platform. In a recent conversation, he shared insights about the user profile of China’s local NFT and digital collectible audience. It turns out, this group hardly overlaps at all with the Web3 users we interact with internationally.
The Chinese market is essentially a de-financialized NFT space. Most users interact with these collectibles through relatively centralized platforms. Their understanding of wallets, on-chain data, digital assets, and blockchain-related concepts—the core ideas behind true NFTs—is still very limited. However, there are now Chinese teams actively working on market education and user guidance, showing how real digital collectibles can integrate with personal wallets and broader Web3 tools.
So I’m optimistic about China’s future market. This user base has already undergone early-stage market education through domestic digital collectible platforms. The next step is enhancing education around tooling and wallets, and lowering entry barriers via product design—enabling more users to transition directly into the Web3 ecosystem.
Blue Star from Element Market: On the similarities and differences between Chinese and overseas NFT markets—personally, starting with trading platforms, Chinese-built NFT platforms have yet to catch up in market share. I'm specifically referring to Ethereum-based markets, where Western-built platforms still dominate. We’re still playing catch-up here.
From the project side, based on current data, foreign projects that invest heavily in treasury management and show strong operational performance tend to be seen as more reliable. However, data also shows that scam-and-dump projects exist at similar rates among both Chinese and foreign initiatives. Chinese or Chinese-language NFT projects often experience sharper volatility—examples include earlier projects like Bear Conclusions and Cold Rabbit.
Looking at user motivations, a common observation is that Chinese users (flippers) tend to focus more on financial attributes. Bulk minting ("whale sniping") is also predominantly done by Chinese participants. Excluding domestic digital collectible users, and counting only Chinese participants in international NFT markets, our estimate is around 5,000 users—many of whom use multiple addresses and participate in primary markets. As a result, among blue-chip NFT projects, there are virtually no Chinese-led projects recognized as blue-chips today.
On the other hand, data shared by Chinese community members showed about 2 million daily active users in digital collectible products two months ago—though current figures are unclear. Still, I remain hopeful that eventually, a Chinese-language project will rise to blue-chip status. We haven’t seen it yet, but given time, it’s bound to happen.
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Column Introduction
"OGtown" is an authorized article column by the Chinese-speaking CryptoPunks community, established in 2021 as the earliest and highest asset-holding private NFT community in China. Membership requires verification via owning a CryptoPunk. The community now includes over 200 CryptoPunk holders and stands as the most concentrated Chinese hub for prominent Web3 figures—comprising founders, executives, representatives from Christie’s and Sotheby’s Asia/China, listed companies, renowned NFT projects, exchanges, legacy blockchain media, Chinese influencers, and major NFT collectors. The community maintains strong connections with top international OGs. We welcome friends from all sectors to connect with PunksCN to jointly advance the development and progress of the Chinese-speaking NFT space.
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