Alipay, one of China’s major payment apps, has again rolled out non-fungible token artworks designed as wallpapers for users’ payment code pages, with a total of 80,000 copies of two editions combined having sold out within a day.
Fast facts
- Alipay yesterday started selling two editions of artworks — built on its own Ant Chain — featuring popular Chinese animated film “White Snake 2: The Tribulation of the Green Snake,” which hit the big screen last month.
- Buyers were able to get their hands on the artworks using 10 Alipay points plus 9.90 yuan (US$1.53).
- The latest sales followed Alipay’s June successful drop of NFT art adapted from images of flying apsaras and sacred deer from the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, or Mogao Cave, in the Chinese city of Dunhuang.
- Founded in 2015, Ant Chain took pride in its flagship products, including Ant Group’s blockchain-as-a-service cloud service platform and OpenChain, a hybrid permissionless/permissioned chain for developers building decentralized applications.
- Ant Group, e-commerce giant Alibaba’s fintech affiliate, has invested heavily in blockchain technology. It was ranked among the top Chinese industrial blockchain enterprises in 2020, based on a full year of observation and analysis of company data. It has also cooperated with China’s central bank on the development of e-CNY, the country’s prototype state-operated digital currency.
- In June, Ant Group launched the Blockchain Transmission Network, a high-speed, long-distance blockchain communications technology that promises to help improve the data throughput and stability of blockchains.