RelayNode is getting decentralized!
No there won’t be an ICO - we are just moving to Substack, which allows each of the local editions to have their own archive page that is sharable, as requested by our loving subscribers.
Each of our local editions will be managed independently and sent out via Substack from here on out:
San Francisco RelayNode - Curated by Chris McCann
Berlin RelayNode - Curated by Bethany D'Sylva
London RelayNode - Curated by Christina Norgard Rud
NYC RelayNode - Curated by David Gogel and Hsin-Ju
Chicago RelayNode - Curated by Eleni Steinman and Brooke Walter
Hong Kong & Singapore - Curated by Jason Choi
For the China edition, we will continue to share crypto insights and events from this part of the world, along with more infrequent essays featuring hypest topics and solid person. Nothing is required on your behalf - if you'd like to stay subscribed, you will be! If you do not want to stay subscribed for whatever reason, you may find the unsubscribe link on the bottom.
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China saw zero locally transmitted Covid-19 cases outside Hubei and most of my friends in China are back to normal work (wearing facial masks though), while the affected cases started to pick up in other countries. San Francisco has declared a state of emergency for the city last week and my family started to stay at home.
In the past month, all offline events have been canceled and most of the crypto activities/conversations are happening on wechat groups - the center of topics is still round the “halving effect” (减半行情) - it’s a consensus around investors’ expectations about the price increase that created hype, fomo, and eventually pumped the price - but the views are shifting as people are worried that the black swan will make the halving effect disappear this year.
What’s new
The Steem/Justin/Binance voting drama and the Fcoin’s shutdown led to increasing distrust of centralized crypto exchanges. People started to joke about at least some exchanges have domestic offices so they know where to defend rights (维权) if bad things happen.
The hypest new PoW coins - Bitmain to release CKB (Eaglesong) ASICs K5 in April. HNS (Blake2B+SHA3) ASIC is also on the way.
Crypto-lending - Wu Jihan’s Matrixport is raising $40M at $300M valuation, Babel Finance plans to raise $10M-20M at $100M-200M valuation.
Binance’s new local hire of a sexy young lady brought common gossip and critiques.
Something to read
Adiasg shared an explainer to smart contract dev about design choices in Eth2 during EthCC3.
Near’s next generation randomness beacon scheme will be similar to what will be used in DFinity, which is based on threshold signature. An overview could be found here.(Chinese translation is here)
GitLab’s guide to remote work - I have been at remote work mode most of my time for the past two years and this is what I referred to. WFH is the new black.
Events
N/A - most events in China have been postponed or cancelled due to COVID-19.
Notable Conferences
Feb 29 - Mar 4 - Binance Blockchain Week (Vietnam) - postponed
March 27-28 - Bitcoin2020 (San Francisco) - moved to Q3
April 3-7 - Ethereum's Edcon (Vienna) - canceled
April 4-5 - Deconomy (Korea)
May 1-2 - DeFi Discussions Conf with ConsenSys (Virtual)
May 9-10 - Magical Crypto Conference (New York City)
June 15-21 - Korea Blockchain Week (Seoul)
July 6-7 - M2 Asset Management (Oxford)
July 15-16 - Asia Blockchain Summit (Taipei)
Sep 28-30 - Hong Kong Blockchain Week 2020
October - Token2049 (Hong Kong)