Shanghai Residents Document Life With Covid Restrictions Through NFTs

Residents of Shanghai, China, are using NFT technology to document their month-long Covid ordeal. In a city of over 26 million, many face huge lockdowns, restrictions of movement, and difficulty getting essentials.

Authorities in Shanghai have recently announced new enforcement of lockdown measures as Covid continues to rage in the city. These new measures include door alarms to stop infected citizens from leaving their homes and removing people to government-run centralised quarantine.

This one size fits all approach by the government has left people frustrated. Locked in their homes in Shanghai, they have turned to NFTs to vent their frustrations. What’s more, they are documenting what they are going through. China is trying to combat this through censorship, but the NFTs can’t just disappear.

In particular, citizens highlighted a video of voices recorded throughout the Shanghai outbreak. The six-minute video titled “The Voice of April” underlines people’s struggle in Shanghai. There are almost 786 different items connected to the video on OpenSea.

Notoriously, cryptocurrency trading is under restrictions in China, but these rules do not currently apply to NFTs.

NFTs are immortalising what is currently going on inside the megacity. It is unclear when the Covid restrictions will end in Shanghai, but citizens’ NFT minting and sharing will concern the Chinese government. Whereas with social media, it is easy for them to delete posts and change focus, NFTs are on the blockchain forever.