NFT News

The largest Japanese airlines, All Nippon Airways (ANA) and ANA NEO launched their NFT marketplace, named “GranWhale NFT MarketPlace”, according to local reports.

ANA said it launched its NFT marketplace in a move to increase the NFT product line and add more value to the customer experience through NFT commercialization.

The NFT platform will include artworks created by aerial photographer Luke Ozawa. “From May 30, aerial photographer Luke Ozawa’s first digital photo will be converted to NFT. One of them will be sold with a positive film, which is the source of photo development. The price is 100,000 yen, and the NFT with the positive film will be sold at auction,” Impress Watch of Japan reported.

The Japanese airline announced that it would offer the second collection of NFTs on June 7, representing an NFT image of the first Boeing 787 operated by ANA. The second collection will include a total of 1,574 items, and the price for each one is 7,870 yen.

In August, ANA Neo announced the launch of its virtual travel platform named “ANA GranWhale,” which is a metaverse travel service that utilizes technology, including VR, to recreate the destinations and cultures of the world and will consist of three services; travel theme park space, shopping space, and space inspired by the city of the future.

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party’s Web3 project team prepared in April a whitepaper in which they suggest ways to expand the Web3 industry in the country in line with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s national strategy.

The Japanese Web3 team aims to overcome the bureaucratic processes in order to formulate regulations covering the NFTs to decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

The data showed that the total collectible avatar holders of Reddit NFTs are 10,004,124 at the time of writing. Of these holders, there are over 7.73 million single collective avatar holders. These holders have a single avatar and do not use multiple wallet addresses. The Reddit NFTs are designed by independent content creators and artists within the Reddit community, according to Crypto News.

It is worth noting that the number of avatar holders had remarkably increased in 2023 as the count of Reddit NFTs holders recorded an 80% increase this year, however, it was around three million holders only in November. The number of wallets also tripled over the past six months.

Currently, the market capitalization of Reddit NFTs is $45,879,805, with a collection of 13,868,595 NFT avatars.

In this regard, Polygon Co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, during an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) session, lauded the success of Reddit NFTs on Polygon, saying: “The company cracked the NFT code and they are able to drive a lot of engagement with Reddit NFTs.”

He pointed out that he considers having a secondary marketplace to trade those NFTs or having a launchpad for artists to launch their collections, which could be great additions to take Reddit NFTs to the next level.

Polygon is a blockchain platform that provides fast and low-cost blockchains for application builders to build decentralized applications. It is built as a Layer2 blockchain ecosystem on top of Ethereum.

The trading volume of Bitcoin Ordinals NFTs currently stands in second place behind Ethereum, whose trading volume reached $391.625 million. While the trading volume on the Bitcoin blockchain is $171,252,359 at the time of writing, more than double the trading volume on Solana, which recorded $54,395,081, according to Cointelegraph. 

From April 23, Bitcoin blockchain’s sales could surpass the sales of Polygon, ImmutableX, and BNB Chain. 

Dune dashboard showed that the transactions of BRC-20 token standard creator Domo, BRC-20 token dominated the majority of ordinals activity on Bitcoin. Cointelegraph said traders who are looking for benefit from the newfound trend are the main reason behind this growing sales as the trading activity around the BRC-20 tokens will likely fall later. 

Notably, the market began to shift its focus from BRC-20 tokens to Bitcoin NFTs as the marketplaces, which trade in them, begin to achieve higher trading volume, like Magic Eden. NFT traders will hope to repeat the success of Ethereum NFTs on Bitcoin with collections forming exclusive groups of ordinals holders.

Earlier this month, Binance announced its NFT marketplace will support Bitcoin NFTs, known as Bitcoin Ordinals, soon to offer more choices and opportunities for the NFT creators and collectors and benefit from Bitcoin’s unique culture and innovative tech.

Also cryptocurrency exchange OKX announced the integration of Bitcoin NFTs into its NFT marketplace and wallet ecosystem in April. Magic Eden did also so in March.

Chinese regulators are still looking at the NFTs with an eye of skepticism, doubting their potential as an investment tool, Coingeek reported.

The Supreme People’s Procuratorate of China issued a publication that sheds light on risks associated with an investment in NFTs, including financial risks, management risks, network security risks, etc., especially legal risks, calling on citizens to stay away from digital collectibles.

The Chinese report pointed to multiple risks that could be resulted from the NFTs, like unauthorized fundraising, price manipulations, fraud, scams, and malicious hype.

Wang Xiafang, one of the report’s authors, highlighted the role of the NFTs in protecting intellectual property rights, promoting the development of cultural and creative undertakings, and enriching the digital economy, however, she asserted the importance of the government’s crackdown on criminal activities committed under the guise of new technologies and new formats.

Wang affirmed the necessity of cooperating with administrative agencies to carry out traceability governance and comprehensive governance, guiding administrative agencies to make full use of existing legal regulations and industry norms, and bringing financial activities under the guise of new business forms into supervision.

In March, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) of China said that Chinese users submitted 59,700 NFT-related complaints in 2022.

According to SAMR’s recent data, this number represented a 30,000% increase compared to the previous year, which witnessed less than 200 complaints related to the NFTs.

The Chinese users mainly complained about the non-delivery of purchased NFTs, charging high fees, non-refunds, strange growing prices, and random banning of consumer accounts. The report pointed to the difficulty of supervising a new field, such as digital collectibles.

Earlier on November 29, the Hangzhou Internet Court ruled that the NFT collections are online virtual property that should be protected under Chinese law. The court said that the NFTs have the “object characteristics of property rights such as value, scarcity, controllability, and tradeability” which should be protected by Chinese law.

The court noted that the NFTs have the value of related intellectual property rights as it reflects the creator’s original expression of art.