NFTs protect Shanghai’s Covid-19 lockdown record from censorship in China

Residents in Shanghai are storing their memories of the city’s Covid-19 lockdown in non-fungible tokens to avoid deletion and to ensure they may be shared.

Unable to leave their homes for weeks at a time, many of Shanghai’s 25 million citizens have vented their rage online – over harsh lockdown limitations and the difficulty in obtaining enough food. They have also recounted experiences of adversity, such as people who were unable to obtain medical treatment.

This has heightened the cat-and-mouse game with Chinese censors, who have vowed to increase surveillance of the internet and group conversations to prevent what they call rumors and efforts to sow unrest amid public outrage over the closure.

While some users have stubbornly persisted to republish the content, others are minting movies, images, and artworks depicting their trauma as NFTs, drawn in part by the notion that data stored on the blockchain is unerasable.