This weekly roundup of reports from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong makes an attempt to curate the business’s most vital information, together with influential initiatives, adjustments within the regulatory panorama, and enterprise blockchain integrations.  

A lot like final 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 superb 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 assist builders engaged on scaling options for Ethereum and was backed by main initiatives equivalent to Polygon, Close to, The Graph, and Matter Labs. The successful crew, which received bounties and mentorship, was a Synthetix-based asset administration venture. The winners known as themselves ObjK and used querying expertise from The Graph to tug knowledge from Synthetix, attaining an automatic cross-pool portfolio rebalance.

Layer-twos have all the time been well-liked in China, notably 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 attributable to 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, 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 based mostly on BSC’s PancakeSwap. That TVL would rank across the thirtieth largest 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. After all, the problem will likely be on the purposes and community to keep up 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 thrice the transaction quantity of your complete Huobi Eco Chain on Thursday.

Finally, 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, somewhat 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 appropriate software is deployed on it.

China’s personal shadowy super-coders

In response to 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 rip-off that occurred in late 2019. Since then, the variety of addresses participating 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 foreign money crackdown was talked about in a listing of 2021 efforts thus far.

Tech giants eyeing up the NFT house

Crypto firms aren’t the one ones feeling the wrath of Chinese language regulators lately. Over the previous week, a whole bunch 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 value this month alone. Nonetheless, that didn’t cease it from saying this week that it will launch an NFT buying and selling platform that roughly interprets as “Magic Core”. Third events can reportedly launch NFT art work on the platform, and it’s designed by simply one in every of a number of groups inside Tencent which can be growing NFT associated companies. Attributable to China’s strict regulatory insurance policies, many of the NFTs launched by the main web firms are constructed on personal chains or consortium chain expertise. Alibaba additionally launched an NFT platform in late June.