The United Nations has approved an initiative led by Chinese entertainment conglomerate Tencent, to create international standards for Non-Fungible Tokens.
The U.N. agency for information and communication technologies and The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) approved the project, which has been dubbed “technical framework for DLT-based digital collection services”.
The first draft is expected at the end of 2022, and a final draft in 2023 according to a report by the South China Morning Post.
Others taking part in the project include: Ant Group, the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and Zhejiang Lab, an innovation centre founded by the Zhejiang Provincial government, Zhejiang University and Alibaba Group Holding.
Any recommendations can however only be adopted after a vote by all nations.
That would be a very optimistic scenario, as many Western countries would not wish to see China or Chinese companies take a leading role in blockchain technologies.
The Chinese government has banned cryptocurrencies, and Chinese NFTs cannot use public, decentralized blockchains, and must instead use China’s state-backed Blockchain Services Network (BSN). All purchases must also be in Yuan.
It is therefore quite unlikely that the rest of the world would want China writing the standards.
We’ll have to wait and see how this develops.
