What was NEAR Doing at the 2021 Taobao Maker Festival?
Live Report from Shanghai, China
I was very lucky to be in Shanghai just in time for the 2021 Taobao Maker Festival. The NEAR Shanghai team was generous enough to invite me to the booth where artist Huang Heshan was selling his NEAR-based NFTs. So on the 22nd of July, I visited the “Too Rich City Real Estate Agency” to see what the hype is all about.
China’s e-commerce giant, Taobao, held its annual merchant roadshow from July 17th to the 25th. This is the event where young creatives showcase the future of commerce. Buzzing with excitement, the 30,000 square meter exhibition space was full of jazzy, eye-catching booths displaying the trendiest and most innovative in culture and tech: everything from hot pot-scented candles, sustainable fashion, to flying cars.
“Virtual Property” NFTs Minted on NEAR
Among the 150+ booths featured this year was artist Huang Heshan’s “Too Rich City Real Estate Agency”, which was created in collaboration with NEAR Protocol and Web3Games.
The concept is of a real estate agency selling property of a complex called “Butu Garden” in the fictional city of “Too Rich”. The “property” in question are 310 digital cards of apartment buildings and villas Huang minted as NFTs on NEAR. Huang’s was one of the first NFTs to feature at the Taobao Maker Festival in its entire history.
Cyberpunk with Chinese characteristics
“You use a mix of elements like shop signs, satellites, and franchise logos, and incorporate different architectural styles in your artwork. What are they referencing?” I asked the artist. Huang replied,
“It’s a parallel universe based on what Beijing looks like today.”
Huang’s work is a collage of the mise-en-scène of China’s urban village-scape and elements of the Beijing cityscape. At the same time, it reflects the socioeconomic situation of Chinese youth today. The model Chinese life, which is intimately tied to home ownership, is unachievable for many of China’s post-95 generation. With real real estate is out of reach, these aspirations are instead channeled through virtual real estate.
The mascot of the Too Rich series is “Mr. Too Rich”: a nouveau riche, bald-headed real estate tycoon sporting the “Beijing bikini”. Again, a whimsical reflection of the cultural signifiers of modern China. What has been translated into “Too Rich” in Chinese is actually tulifu 秃力富： tu meaning “bald”; li meaning “hardworking”; and fu meaning “rich”. The title humorously captures the concerns unifying the post-95 generation: premature baldness, hard work, and wealth.
Taobao on the Surface, NEAR Underneath
When I visited, exhibition-goers swarmed the booth all throughout the day. At the sight of the QR code, they immediately whipped out their phones to scan it.
“It’s virtual property,” the attendant would tell them. “You can use your Taobao app.”
The NFT purchasing process was designed to be as familiar and seamless as possible for any regular user, but underneath it is the infrastructure of NEAR. The QR code leads customers to a custom app built by Web3Games, where they can purchase the NFTs with fiat (CNY). The customer is then prompted to create a NEAR wallet, where they can then store and see their NFT on display. Now these NFT holders own an exclusive asset on the NEAR blockchain, which proves its authenticity and provenance — all without needing to understand how that works.
Sold Out in Two Days
“So I can buy them through the app?” Interested customers would ask. At this point, the attendant would have to reply, “Yes, but they are already sold out.”
In fact, all 310 of Huang’s NFTs — ranging from 699 ($107) to 22888 CNY ($3530) each — were sold out in the first two days. The artist quickly added a thousand more NFTs of parasols and some parking spots for his fictional town to appease the crowd. In total, the NFT sales have recorded over 350K CNY ($53,980). This is only for the primary sale, however. Enthusiastic buyers have created secondary markets for Huang’s NFTs on WeChat, and some portions of his NFTs have been resold for more than 10 times their original price. At one point, Huang’s works even trended on a popular Chinese social media platform, Weibo.
One Twitter user by the name of CaoYin passed on the sentiment of Chinese internet users:
Overall, NEAR made quite the splash through Huang’s NFT sales at the 2021 Taobao Maker Festival.
Is the Age of Blockchain Mass Adoption NEAR?
The experience was a vibrant, eye-opening, and dazzling one. Huang’s art itself is hugely intriguing as a snapshot of today’s Chinese society and culture. But going even further, it illuminates on how NFT art can be successful by incorporating the medium into the art. The idea of virtual real estate for a fictional world maps on perfectly to the virtual nature of blockchain-based assets such as NFTs (and alludes to the virtual worlds they can inhabit such as the metaverse).
On the crypto side of things, the hybrid fiat-based NFT sale once again demonstrates the power of NEAR’s flexible and user-friendly infrastructure. The commitment to mass adoption and usability is at the core of NEAR’s design, and it is what allowed for the seamless onboarding of Taobao users onto the NEAR chain. What I’ve seen at the 2021 Taobao Maker Festival leaves me even more bullish for the future of Open Web and finance we will witness on NEAR.
Rim Berjack is a writer for 4NTS Guild. You can check out their Medium for more content or follow them on Twitter.
