This weekly news summary from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong attempts to plan the most important news in the industry, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory environment, and enterprise blockchain integration.
a lot of Just like last weekAs the country seeks to avoid a more severe lockdown, a minor COVID emergency in China dominates the headlines. Cryptocurrencies managed to stay away from the news, which can only be seen as a good thing considering the recent regulation.
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Like the second floor very much
On August 3, IOSG Ventures and Chainlink held the Demo Day of Layer-Two Hackathon in Shanghai. The event aims to support developers working on Ethereum scaling solutions, and is supported by major projects such as Polygon, Near, The Graph, and Matter Labs. The winning team that won the prize money and coaching was a Synthetix-based asset management project. The winner calls himself ObjK and uses The Graph’s query technology to extract data from Synthetix to achieve automatic cross-pool portfolio rebalancing.
Layer-twos has always been very popular in China, especially because users are not too concerned about custody risks and decentralization. Last week, OKEx officially launched OKExChain, which is a two-layer network compatible with EVM, similar to the networks released by other large exchanges.
This is interesting due to OKEx’s large user base, Which ranks second Only available to Binance when sorted by transaction volume. The second-tier networks released by exchanges often lack some of the technical advantages of dedicated second-tier networks, but they have huge advantages in accessing users, assets, projects, and communities.
OKExChain proves this, because it accumulated more than $2 billion in assets in the first week. About $350 million of this comes from AMM CherrySwap, which seems to be very freely based on BSC’s PancakeSwap. The TVL will rank the 30th largest DeFi application on all networks, and the size is about the same as OlympusDAO on Ethereum and BakerySwap on BSC. KSwap is another AMM platform on OKExChain, with a 24-hour transaction volume of over US$684 million on Thursday, ranking second among the busiest dApps in the industry, second only to Uniswap V3. Of course, after the generous APY is reduced to more sustainable numbers, applications and networks will face the challenge of maintaining these early numbers.
Track adoption elsewhere
Although the DEX transaction volume on both BSC and the Huobi ecological chain is declining, BSC has recently seen a surge in activity around CryptoBlades, which is an NFT game that accounted for more than three times the transaction volume of the entire Huobi ecological chain on Thursday.
Ultimately, for chains like Huobi ECO or OKExChain to compete with other Layer 2 networks, they must find a way to recruit unique application developers into their ecosystem instead of relying on ports or forks of other networks . As demonstrated by Axie Infinity, any blockchain network can be filled with transactions and users if the correct application is deployed on it.
China’s own shady super programmer
According to a report by Chainanalysis, during the two-year period from April 2019 to this summer, more than $2.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency was sent from Chinese wallets to addresses related to illegal activities.
Most of them are related to the notorious PlusToken Ponzi scheme This happened at the end of 2019. Since then, the number of addresses engaged in fraud and illegal activities has dropped sharply, indicating that China’s crackdown has had some impact on consumer protection.
Regulators seem to be satisfied with their victory, as evidenced by an article at the People’s Bank of China working conference last week, which mentioned the crackdown on digital currencies in its list of efforts so far in 2021.
Tech giants pay attention to the NFT field
Nowadays, crypto companies are not the only ones feeling the anger of Chinese regulators. In the past week, Hundreds of billions of dollars It has been erased from Chinese technology stocks including online education, delivery and video games.
Tencent, which invests in several major game publishers, has dropped more than 17% in its share price this month alone.Nonetheless, this did not stop it Announced this week It will release a NFT trading platform Roughly translated as “Magic Core”. According to reports, third parties can publish NFT art works on the platform, and it is only designed by one of several teams that develop NFT-related services internally by Tencent. Due to China’s strict regulatory policies, most of the NFTs launched by major Internet companies are based on private chain or consortium chain technology.Alibaba Also launched NFT platform in late June.
