This weekly roundup of reports from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong makes an attempt to curate the business’s most essential information, together with influential tasks, adjustments 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 not too long ago, can solely be seen as a very good factor.
A lot love for the layer-twos
On August 3, 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 tasks similar to Polygon, Close to, The Graph, and Matter Labs. The successful workforce, which received bounties and mentorship, was a Synthetix-based asset administration venture. The winners referred to as themselves ObjK and used querying know-how from The Graph to drag knowledge from Synthetix, reaching an automatic cross-pool portfolio rebalance.
Layer-twos have all the time been standard 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 just like what different massive exchanges have launched.
That is of curiosity as a result of OKEx’s massive userbase, which ranks second solely to Binance when sorted by quantity. Layer-two networks launched by exchanges typically lack among the technical strengths of the devoted layer-two networks however have an enormous benefit in entry to customers, belongings, tasks and communities.
OKExChain was proof of this because it amassed over $2 billion in belongings 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 thirtieth greatest DeFi app on all networks, across the dimension 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 business. In fact, the problem will likely be on the functions and community to take care of these early numbers after the beneficiant APYs have been decreased to extra sustainable numbers.
Monitoring adoption elsewhere
Regardless of declining DEX buying and selling quantity on each BSC and Huobi Eco Chain, BSC not too long ago 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 option to recruit distinctive app builders to their ecosystems, moderately than counting on ports or forks from different networks. As Axie Infinity has proven, any blockchain community can grow to be loaded stuffed with transactions and customers if the precise software is deployed on it.
China’s personal shadowy super-coders
In response to a Chainanalysis report, greater than $2.2 billion value 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 participating in scams and criminal activity has shrunk dramatically, indicating that Chinese language clampdowns are having some impression on shopper 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 foreign money crackdown was talked about in an inventory of 2021 efforts thus far.
Tech giants eyeing up the NFT area
Crypto firms aren’t the one ones feeling the wrath of Chinese language regulators lately. 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 plenty of main recreation publishers, suffered a greater than 17% drop in inventory worth this month alone. Nonetheless, that didn’t cease it from saying 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 certainly one of a number of groups inside Tencent which can be creating NFT associated providers. Because of China’s strict regulatory insurance policies, many of the NFTs launched by the most important web firms are constructed on personal chains or consortium chain know-how. Alibaba also launched an NFT platform in late June.
