Chinese tech giant Huawei debuts NFTs

Huawei’s cloud computing arm Tuesday airdropped the brand’s first batch of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), making it the latest Chinese tech giant to join the trend.

Fast facts

• The airdropping of NFTs based on the brand’s mascot is a part of Huawei Cloud’s branding campaign.

• The NFTs are based on Huawei’s blockchain — the “petal chain” — despite Huawei not publicly stating that it will launch on the NFT platform.

• The airdrop was fully bought out at press time.

• Chinese tech giants such as Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, NetEase and JD.com have launched their NFT marketplaces.

• Despite the lack of clear regulations on NFTs, criticism by state-owned media has prompted tech giants to restrict or ban NFT reselling.
• In a research report in April, Chinese brokerage firm Guosen Securities noted the country’s NFT market would be valued at 29.8 billion yuan (US$4.68 billion) if regulators allowed reselling. Without that, it would only be worth around 6 billion yuan (US$937 million).