This weekly roundup of reports from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong makes an attempt to curate the trade’s most necessary information, together with influential initiatives, modifications within the regulatory panorama, and enterprise blockchain integrations.
A lot like last week, China’s minor COVID flareups dominated the headlines because the nation seeks to keep away from extra critical lockdowns. Cryptocurrency managed to remain out of the information, which contemplating the regulation lately, can solely be seen as a very good factor.
A lot love for the layer-twos
On August three, IOSG Ventures and Chainlink hosted the Demo Day of the Layer-Two Hackathon in Shanghai. The occasion aimed to help builders engaged on scaling options for Ethereum and was backed by main initiatives reminiscent of Polygon, Close to, The Graph, and Matter Labs. The successful group, which gained bounties and mentorship, was a Synthetix-based asset administration venture. The winners known as themselves ObjK and used querying know-how from The Graph to drag knowledge from Synthetix, attaining an automatic cross-pool portfolio rebalance.
Layer-twos have at all times been in style in China, significantly as customers really feel much less involved about custodial dangers and decentralization. Final week, OKEx formally launched OKExChain, which is an EVM-compatible layer-two community much like what different massive exchanges have launched.
That is of curiosity attributable to OKEx’s massive userbase, which ranks second solely to Binance when sorted by quantity. Layer-two networks launched by exchanges typically lack a few of the technical strengths of the devoted layer-two networks however have an enormous benefit in entry to customers, property, initiatives and communities.
OKExChain was proof of this because it amassed over $2 billion in property within the first week. About $350 million of that’s on AMM CherrySwap, which seems to be fairly liberally primarily based on BSC’s PancakeSwap. That TVL would rank across the 30th greatest DeFi app on all networks, across the measurement of OlympusDAO on Ethereum and BakerySwap on BSC. KSwap, one other AMM platform on OKExChain, racked up over $684 million in 24-hour commerce quantity on Thursday, which places it second behind Uniswap V3 for the busiest dApp within the trade. After all, the problem will probably be on the functions and community to take care of these early numbers after the beneficiant APYs have been diminished to extra sustainable numbers.
Monitoring adoption elsewhere
Regardless of declining DEX buying and selling quantity on each BSC and Huobi Eco Chain, BSC lately noticed an explosion in exercise round CryptoBlades, an NFT recreation that accounted for greater than 3 times the transaction quantity of all the Huobi Eco Chain on Thursday.
In the end, for chains like Huobi ECO or OKExChain to compete with different layer-two networks, they need to discover a method to recruit distinctive app builders to their ecosystems, fairly than counting on ports or forks from different networks. As Axie Infinity has proven, any blockchain community can turn into loaded filled with transactions and customers if the best software is deployed on it.
China’s personal shadowy super-coders
In accordance with a Chainanalysis report, greater than $2.2 billion price of cryptocurrency had been despatched from Chinese language wallets to addresses related to illicit exercise within the two-year interval between April of 2019 and this summer season.
The majority of that is associated to the notorious PlusToken ponzi scam that happened in late 2019. Since then, the variety of addresses partaking in scams and criminality has shrunk dramatically, indicating that Chinese language clampdowns are having some affect on client protections.
Regulators appear to be taking satisfaction of their victories, as evidenced by an article from a Individuals’s Financial institution of China working convention final week, the place the digital forex crackdown was talked about in an inventory of 2021 efforts up to now.
Tech giants eyeing up the NFT area
Crypto firms aren’t the one ones feeling the wrath of Chinese language regulators today. Over the previous week, hundreds of billions of dollars have been wiped from Chinese language tech shares together with on-line training, supply, and video gaming.
Tencent, which invests in quite a few main recreation publishers, suffered a greater than 17% drop in inventory worth this month alone. Nonetheless, that didn’t cease it from asserting this week that it would release an NFT trading platform that roughly interprets as “Magic Core”. Third events can reportedly launch NFT paintings on the platform, and it’s designed by simply one among a number of groups inside Tencent which can be growing NFT associated companies. As a result of China’s strict regulatory insurance policies, a lot of the NFTs launched by the key web firms are constructed on personal chains or consortium chain know-how. Alibaba also launched an NFT platform in late June.
