A concept photo of blockchain Illustration: VCG

China launched its first national-level secondary trading platform for digital assets on the first day of 2023, aiming to support trade of intellectual property, digital copyrights and digital collections.

As the country's digital economy has witnessed rapid development in recent years, digital assets have emerged, backed by information technology including blockchain as well as Web 3.0. The newly established platform will enhance regulation of virtual trade, and aims to boost digital innovation as well as promote the healthy development of the digital trade market, experts said.

Designed to be compliant on a national level, the trading platform was jointly built by the government-backed China Technology Exchange and Art Exhibitions China, as well as blockchain developer Huaban Digital Copyrights.

Using the "China Cultural Protection Chain" as the only credible depository service platform for tradable digital assets, the platform will provide institutions and individual users with digital asset registration, verification, depository, rights monitoring and copyright protection services.

In addition, the platform will work together with the "Digital Collection Home," the first metaverse digital collection credit evaluation and aggregation platform in China, developed by Zhongrong Global Holdings Co, to provide users with services bringing valuable information, data and content related to the metaverse and digital collectibles.

"The establishment of the platform will further protect intellectual rights and promote digital innovation to boost the country's digital economy," Wang Peng, a research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Monday.

In the previous development boom, secondary transactions, as an important means of speculation, faced strict limitations from most digital collections in China. Wang added that for the field of digital collectibles, the launch of the platform indicated that the country has a national-level compliant secondary trading platform, which will unleash greater value in the trading of digital assets under government regulation.

The establishment of the platform came after the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council jointly released 20 new measures to strengthen growth of digital economy and boost high-quality economic development.

According to the document, the country will build basic data systems in four aspects: data property rights, circulation and transaction, revenue distribution and security governance.