Hello, welcome to RelayNode China! China’s blockchain ecosystem is growing rapidly. We are aiming to share what local people are discussing and curious about and provide a weekly curated list of interesting content and upcoming (virtual) events. During this special period of time, please stay safe, healthy and informed :)
Bitcoin just had its third halving last week with numerous online celebrations - F2pool wrote “NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed's Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue”on the final block before halving, which reminded us why bitcoin was created.
People believe the governments’ quantitative easing may push the BTC price to new highs down the road. However, the current sentiment is mild, if not gloomy, especially for miners as their profits just halved. As of today, the hashrate dropped to 95 TH/S, or nearly 30% from prior-halving‘s peak according to data from tokenview.
The hashrate distribution among mining pools are changing as new competitors are joining to split the pie. A new mining pool Lubian emerged right after the halving with over 6EH/s (~6% of the total hash), people suspect it may be formed by individual miner(s) to save ~3% cut from using a mining pool.
Binance also started its BTC pool less than a month ago with 0 fee, which now has a market share of ~3%. Huobi started mining pool business in 2018 and OKEx in 2019, each has a market share of ~6%.
Yang Haibo, founder of ViaBTC commented on the new competition: miners and traders are already overlapping, pool business won’t drive new users and transaction volume growth to exchanges as they hope; providing subsidies will help in gaining market share but not profits; for a mining pool business, products and services are equally important - it requires extremely high stability, global distributed access, high performance, high-speed block synchronization speed and low orphan block rate etc.
It is now rainy season in China’s southwest and miners are benefiting from the cheap hydropower electricity, but the old generation mining rigs like Bitmain S9 will be obsoleted after the season if the BTC price stay at current range.
What’s new
People behind the “WoToken” ponzi scam were brought to trial - it marketed as a multi-crypto wallet app for wealth management which offers 6%-20% monthly interest and accumulated over $1billion from over 700k people with 500 layers from 2018-2019.
The hype about staking and “PoS” is a past term based on returns - Chinese grassroot community Real Satoshi published an article warning the fundamental risks of Cosmos, of which it was once a major advocate and staking node.
FBG One partners with wallet Bitpie to offer a structured financial product to retail investors with a claimed yearly return of 5%-25% (investment amount from 0.1-100BTC). With a 14 days redemption compared to 30 days + industry average.
Two blockchain related occupations are added into a guideline by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, which is responsible for national labor policies & regulations.
blockchain engineers who involves blockchain architecture design, underlying technology, system application, system testing, system deployment, operation and maintenance
blockchain application operator who uses blockchain technology and tools to engage in system operation of scenarios such as government affairs, medical care, education and elderly care service
Standard Chartered released the first offshore RMB-denominated letter-of-credit on the corda-backed Contour blockchain to support the import of iron ore from Australia. Domestically, China has widely adopted blockchain-backed trade finance, with roughly 170 Chinese banks having joined a blockchain platform led by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange to provide trade finance to their clients. The platform is developed by Hangzhou’s Zhongchao Blockchain Technology Research Institute.
The Bitmain founders have been fighting over control of the company for a while and tensions reportedly escalated recently.
Something to read
Blockchain tech’s storytelling problem and how to solve it by Emily Parker from Longhash. She goes into the three main reasons why the industry has this problem: decentralized nature of the space means there’s no designated marketer, that the many in crypto don’t know what story to tell, and how many actors in the space prefer to engage in petty infighting vs. communicating to outsiders. Her suggestions: apply the tech to products that people actually use, lose the jargon, cut down on infighting and toxic maximalism.
A reader’s question about the Parallel Universes
“Do people straddle both worlds? Or are you in one camp or the other? Would you put OKex/Huobi in one bucket and Binance in the other?” - For individuals, if you own some crypto you are one foot in that crypto universe. For business, it’s the same. Given the government's attitude has always been pro-blockchain, not crypto, hence the exchanges moved their “crypto” part out of China and set up new entities/business lines to cater the government's advocates, so here we go (just a glimpse): binance’s blockchain research center in Shanghai, OK’s on-chain big data analysis, and Huobi’s regulator-friendly finance chain.
Virtual event list curated by RelayNode
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