After the wildfire burns, new shoots sprout from the ashes—China's NFT industry is rebuilding order from the ruins.
Two years ago, news of NFT platforms 'running away' was common. Huang from Nanchang, Jiangxi, recharged over 50,000 yuan to purchase NFTs like the Nine-Tailed Fox and Nezha, but the platform suddenly shut down, with the website, app, and public account all ceasing operations, causing money and collectibles to vanish instantly. During the same period, the founder of a 'certain ancient platform' in Shanghai promised double buybacks and platform dividends to induce users to buy, ultimately absconding with funds, which was recognized by the court as fundraising fraud.
After numerous explosion incidents, domestic NFT platforms experienced turmoil between 2022 and 2023, with their numbers nearly halved and the momentum gradually calming. However, from late 2024 to today, we can easily observe that established NFT platforms like 'iBox,' 'Unique,' and 'HOT DOG' are gradually gaining momentum, while new industry players like 'Trendy Cosmos,' 'Zhongwang Yiyun,' and 'Guangming Yipin' are also rapidly rising. Now, let us look back on this arduous journey to explore the path of evolution and redemption for domestic NFT platforms.
01 From Frenzy to Decline: The Domestic NFT Industry is in Turmoil
2022 to 2023 was seen as the 'peak period of explosions' for domestic NFTs. False advertising, promises of high returns, and forged cooperation backgrounds became the norm. A certain tech company even claimed that purchasing collectibles could earn 'reimbursement for travel to Jiangxi,' luring users to recharge.
In a fundraising fraud case heard by the Minhang Court in Shanghai, the defendants used blockchain technology as a guise to package freely downloadable images as 'NFTs,' and designed complex mechanisms such as secondary market trading and points cashback to attract speculators.
These types of platforms often pose significant risks: users do not truly own the collections, as private keys are always controlled by the platform. Once the server shuts down, the so-called collections vanish.
These actions severely overdraw market trust, leading the NFT industry into a year-long freeze. User losses range from tens of thousands to millions, with the industry's credibility nearly reaching zero.
02 Judicial Breakthrough: Clarifying the Property Boundaries of Digital Assets
The turning point came from the judicial authorities' precise differentiation of the nature of cases. In 2025, the Putuo District Court in Shanghai made a groundbreaking determination in a typical case: when NFTs possess artistic characteristics, uniqueness, and scarcity, they meet the 'commodity' attribute, and their transaction contracts are legal and valid.
The ruling of the Nanchang court further advanced the matter. In the case of Huang suing a certain tech company, the court not only determined that the platform must refund and compensate but also explicitly pointed out: the platform's closure rendered the NFTs unusable, constituting fundamental breach of contract.
This effectively confirms the property value of NFTs at the judicial level. Feng Fan, a representative of the National People's Congress, commented on this case: 'It demonstrates the clear attitude of the people's courts to protect the legitimate rights and interests of investors.'
The clear delineation of judicial and regulatory boundaries establishes a new defense line, separating fraudulent investment schemes from genuine commodity transactions, laying the foundation for industry reconstruction.
03 Traditional Capital Enters the Field, Anchoring New Directions for Physical Assets
The significant transformation in the global blockchain field in 2025 is the rapid development of the Real World Asset Tokenization (RWA) industry. Traditional financial giants such as BlackRock and JPMorgan have put more than $23.9 billion in assets on-chain, and BlackRock's BUIDL fund manages nearly $3 billion in assets on Ethereum.
Chinese tech companies are keeping pace: giants like Ant Group and JD.com are laying out plans in the RWA field in the first half of 2025, converting physical assets into on-chain tokens. The essential similarity between RWA and NFTs can be seen as a reconstruction experiment of 'asset forms' by blockchain—RWA leans towards optimizing traditional financial efficiency, while NFTs explore the creation of digital native value, jointly promoting the paradigm shift of ownership economics.
Additionally, both also possess a high degree of compatibility, such as technological integration: RWA infrastructures (like on-chain KYC) being reused by NFT projects to enhance compliance (like Nike's NFT patent authentication); asset hybridization: physical assets deriving digital rights (like holding a certain winery's RWA to obtain limited NFT certificates), forming a 'physical + digital' dual asset layer. This model, anchored in physical value, fundamentally changes the essence of NFTs.
Domestic NFT platforms are no longer limited to speculating on images, but instead connect real value carriers such as artwork property rights, cultural heritage assets, and physical consumption rights. Digital figures of IPs, like the ones from Aofei Entertainment, have emerged, turning anime IPs such as 'Zhenhun Street' and 'Pleasant Goat' into limited edition NFT figures, which are authenticated and sold through Ant Chain, with daily sales exceeding one million yuan, solving piracy issues and expanding IP monetization channels.
Chengdu Cultural Exchange Center's 'Elf Knight IP Digital Authorization' uses blockchain technology to convert film and television IP libraries into standardized digital assets, supporting on-site trading and cross-industry development, shortening the authentication time to 72 hours and increasing trading efficiency by 60%.
The digital mapping of artworks on the Pangu Art Platform transforms artworks such as Wu Qianzhang's landscape paintings into RWA tokens, achieving on-chain authentication and revenue distribution combined with the unique identification of NFTs, promoting financialization of art, among other successful cases. Meanwhile, technical advancements support this transformation: privacy protection technologies like zero-knowledge proofs (zkTLS) allow sensitive data to be placed on-chain, balancing asset authentication and privacy protection.
04 Experience Revolution: From Niche Speculation to Universal Accessibility
One key reason for the failure of the previous generation of NFTs was excessive financialization and a high cognitive threshold. The technological revolution in 2025 completely changed this situation. The rise of AI agents allows users to manage digital assets through natural language commands without needing to understand the underlying logic of blockchain.
As a16z predicted the trend of 'hidden complexity': the new generation of products will encapsulate technical complexity in the background, making the user interface indistinguishable from ordinary e-commerce. The popularization of high-performance public chains like Solana has significantly reduced transaction costs, making small digital asset trading feasible.
The evolution of wallet infrastructure is equally crucial. AI autonomous wallets can replace users in making transaction decisions, combining decentralized biometric verification to enhance security while simplifying operational processes. When purchasing NFTs becomes as simple as placing an order on Taobao, the barriers to the mass market naturally dissolve.
05 Global Compliance Wave: The Soil for the Survival of the Chinese Model
The 'Hong Kong Digital Asset Development Policy Declaration 2.0' released in June by Hong Kong pointed out that the scope of tokenized assets will be expanded from government bonds to physical assets (such as green energy, precious metals, electric vehicle infrastructure), promoting the normalization of RWA issuance. It clearly requires the Monetary Authority and the Securities and Futures Commission to establish a unified licensing system for digital asset service providers, covering RWA issuance, trading, and custody services.
Including digital artworks and IP copyrights within the category of 'tokenized products' encourages the use of blockchain technology for authentication and secondary market trading, and explores stamp tax exemptions to enhance liquidity, marking the ongoing improvement of the regulatory system for domestic NFTs.
The 'Stablecoin Regulation' set to take effect on August 1 requires stablecoin issuers to operate under a license and implement a 100% reserve requirement, providing compliant settlement tools for RWA transactions. It also allows licensed trading platforms to use NFTs as collateral or trading targets, which will undoubtedly significantly promote the financialization of digital collectibles.
At the same time, the progress of security protection mechanisms has been rapid. After a malicious incident in 2025 where a North Korean hacker group stole about $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency, the new generation of domestic NFT platforms generally adopted technologies such as multi-signature wallets and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) to strengthen asset security. The fusion of DeFi and AI (DeAI) is changing the capital operation model and reducing the space for human malfeasance.
When Chinese tech giants like Ant and JD join this transformation in 2025, their chosen path has fundamentally changed from previous years—no longer pursuing inflated digital bubbles, but rather converting cultural assets like porcelain, calligraphy, and music copyrights into on-chain certificates.
The compliance of the Hong Kong crypto market and its increasingly mature regulatory system are running parallel with judicial decisions in the mainland, with many guarantees being implemented, creating a clearer framework for the domestic NFT industry—one layer connects compliant asset flows in the global financial market, while the other is rooted in the digital consumer market of Chinese cultural genes.
Conclusion
When wildfires consume the wasteland, new shoots always pierce through the ashes. The spark of China's NFT industry is reborn like a phoenix—amidst the ruins of the exodus wave, the judicial sword cuts through the fog, injecting capital into the real foundation, forging a bridge of trust through technological innovation, gradually finding the way home amidst adversity.
The flame of rebirth ignites, and the speculative bubble is gradually burned away. As the wave of RWA sweeps in, NFTs finally land from their lofty heights to become digital mirrors of the real economy. From the ruins, a new order has already descended; they will ultimately prove that all the fires that destroyed the industry were merely forging an immortal furnace for true value, composing their own epic of evolution.