Shanghai Residents Turn to NFTs to Preserve Lockdown Memories Amid Censorship

Shanghai residents have found a unique way to preserve their memories of the month-long COVID-19 lockdown that the city experienced. They are turning to blockchain to mint videos, photos, and artworks capturing their ordeal as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which can be shared and saved without the risk of deletion. With 25 million residents unable to leave their homes for weeks at a time, many people have been unleashing their frustrations online, venting about the lockdown curbs, and sharing stories of hardships. This has created a cat-and-mouse game with Chinese censors, who are trying to prevent rumours and efforts to stoke discord over the public frustration with the lockdown.

While some people continue to repost this content, others are turning to NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, where users can mint content and buy or sell it using cryptocurrencies. The data recorded on the blockchain is unerasable, making it a suitable option for preserving their memories. As of Monday, 786 different items related to the six-minute video entitled “The Voice of April” can be found on OpenSea, along with hundreds of other NFTs related to the lockdown in Shanghai.

The height of Shanghai’s lockdown minting moment is rooted in April 22, when netizens battled censors overnight to share “The Voice of April” video, a montage of voices recorded over the course of the Shanghai outbreak. A Chinese Twitter user with the handle imFong minted the “Voice of April” video into an NFT and froze its metadata, ensuring that it would exist forever on the IPFS. A Shanghai-based programmer who viewed his effort to keep the video alive as part of a “people’s rebellion” has minted an NFT based on a screenshot of Shanghai’s COVID lockdown map.

On OpenSea, there are several NFTs for sale that feature various Shanghai-related content, such as Weibo posts expressing discontent with the lockdown measures, pictures capturing the inside of quarantine centers, and creative artworks that draw inspiration from the experience of being under lockdown. Simon Fong, a 49-year-old freelance designer from Malaysia who has been living in Shanghai for nine years, has created satirical illustrations on life under lockdown in the style of Mao-era propaganda posters. He has minted them into NFTs and has sold nine of his works for an average price of 0.1 ether ($290).

Although China has banned cryptocurrency trading, it sees blockchain as a promising technology, and NFTs have been gaining traction in the country, embraced by state media outlets and even tech companies like Ant Group and Tencent Holdings. The protracted lockdown in Shanghai, China’s financial hub, is part of Beijing’s controversial zero-COVID strategy, which has growing risks to its economy. Since March, Shanghai has been hit with the most severe COVID outbreak in China since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, with hundreds of thousands of individuals contracting the virus in the city.