This weekly roundup of news from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong attempts to curate the industry’s most important news, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations. Huobi Asset Management is looking to be the Grayscale of Asia with the launch of four cryptocurrency-related tracker funds. The funds include a Bitcoin Fund, an Ethereum fund, a multi-asset basket of digital currencies, and a private equity fund for mining businesses. The aim is clearly to entice major institutional investors into the space with a product that feels familiar. The fund and asset management company is set …
While Mark Zuckerberg was fighting with the United States Congress over Facebook’s Libra, China took another step forward in the global technology race. President Xi Jinping called on his country to “seize the opportunity” in order to become a leader in blockchain technology as it tries to do likewise with artificial intelligence. This could be an opportunity for China, which has already become the world’s leading trading nation, to stand up to the first economic world power and flex its muscles. But how significant is this move, and what happens if China really wins the blockchain race? “For the Chinese, …
For a tech that was supposed to be democratic and distributed in order to free financial systems from the grip of government-influenced banks and return control of the money supply to the people, cryptocurrencies have turned out to be pretty concentrated. Some 66% of all Bitcoin (BTC) mining now takes place in China, with 54% located in the southwest province of Sichuan, as a recent study revealed. Three Chinese mining pools alone are responsible for nearly half of Bitcoin’s hashrate. The days when a single Bitcoin enthusiast could crunch numbers on their home computer and land a Bitcoin reward for …
Huobi Group CEO Leon Li met with senior Argentinian finance officials this week to discuss the role of blockchain and crypto in the country’s economy, according to a press release shared with Cointelegraph on March 29. In a meeting in Beijing, Argentina’s Deputy Minister of Finance, Felix Martin Soto, claimed that the government should address crypto and blockchain tech as a way to promote Argentina’s financial inclusion and reduce state costs. Soto, who leads Argentina’s international financial relations, explained that half of the country’s population does not have bank accounts and operate cash transactions by converting their savings to United …
China is planning to draw a clear line between cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs), pretty much the same way it did with its digital currency efforts, before the crypto crackdown in the country harms the local NFT industry. The Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN), a government-backed blockchain project in China, is working on infrastructure that would support businesses and individuals to build platforms and apps to manage NFTs, the South China Morning Post reported. Officially called the BSN-Distributed Digital Certificate (BSN-DDC), the project aims to support the deployment of non-crypto NFTs by offering application programming interfaces for the development of user …