THE digital collections commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily, a major local Chinese newspaper, were much sought after at noon Tuesday when the collectibles were officially available, the Daily reported.

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, the newspaper selected 10 pages showing a record of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone’s important moments in the last 40 years. These pages, in collaboration with Tencent, were given for free as digital collections powered by blockchain technology.

The digital collectibles, 20,000 pieces in total, were sent out via the newspaper’s WeChat account, with each version limited to 2,000 pieces.

According to monitoring data, at 51 seconds past 12:05 p.m., 2,000 pieces of the newspaper’s first issue were snapped up. At 59 seconds past 12:22 p.m., all 20,000 pieces were gone.

The carefully selected digital pages are each “bound” in a picture frame with a red background, which is both exquisite and special. Each digital collection has a unique identification on Tencent’s blockchain, which cannot be tampered with and can be stored permanently.

Digital collections, which are nonfungible tokens or NFTs, are pieces of digital content linked to blockchain and are digital assets that represent real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos.

Since 2021, the overseas digital collection market has ushered in explosive growth, the Daily report said. (Zhang Yu)