Alleged arrests made on RMB stablecoin team
Reports from local news outlet PANewsLab suggest that the developers of the offshore Chinese RMB and Hong Kong dollar stablecoin issuer CNHC have either been taken away by law enforcement officials or have lost contact. A photograph shows an apparently empty office building at CNHC’s Shanghai division with a message stating that the building’s assets have been seized by law enforcement and vandalism is prohibited. In March, CNHC raised $10m in its Series A, led by KuCoin Ventures, Circle, and IDG Capital. The team stated that it planned to use the funds for expansion in the Asia Pacific Region and was in the process of moving its headquarters from the Cayman Islands to Hong Kong. The reported move appears to be part of a wider crackdown on cryptocurrencies by Chinese authorities.
On 24 May, tokens of Singaporean inter-blockchain communications protocol Multichain plunged 30% on a delayed backend upgrade and rumours of Chinese police arrests of its core developers, according to Asia Express. Although Multichain says that it is still operational, it stated on 1 June that it is still unable to contact CEO Zhaojun and obtain the necessary server access for maintenance. As a result, the protocol will need to suspend a number of affected cross-chain services. In the past two days, the Multichain protocol has experienced multiple issues due to unforeseeable circumstances.
Hong Kong opens up retail crypto licensing
Despite censorship and bans on the mainland, the adoption of cryptocurrency exchange regulation in Hong Kong proceeded as scheduled. On 31 May, the Hong Kong Virtual Asset Consortium was formed to approve the top 30 cryptocurrencies by market cap for listing and to conduct quarterly reviews of registered digital asset exchanges to ensure compliance with licensing regulations that took effect on 1 June. According to a research report published by multichain wallet provider BitKeep, notable crypto projects such as Avalanche, Conflux, EOS, and Fantom have all joined Hong Kong’s Web3Hub ecosystem fund unveiled in April. With a budget of $10m, the fund will incentivise Web3 projects to set up subsidiaries or headquarters in the special administrative region of China (SAR). The fund is headed by Paul Chan Mo-Po, financial secretary of Hong Kong SAR. BitKeep researchers reminded that HK regulations remain strict for the time being. The new regulations clearly limit the types of tokens that can be traded and the types of services that exchanges can provide.
WeChat allows BTC price quotes
As of 1 June, WeChat, China’s largest social media app with over 1 billion users, has indexed Bitcoin price quotes in its search queries. The move is significant, considering that China has pretty much banned all crypto-related activities such as exchanges, crypto mining, and fiat-crypto on-ramping since 2021. However, if history is any guide, the WeChat Bitcoin search query probably won’t last for long. Formerly, billion-user platforms China Central Television and Chinese TikTok variant Douyin have allowed something similar, only to have authorities pull them down just days after launch.
All Nippon Airways launches NFT marketplace
All Nippon Airways (ANA), the largest airline in Japan with over $12.2bn in revenue in the last fiscal year, launched its aeronautical-themed NFT marketplace dubbed “ANA GranWhale” on 30 May. Developers stated that “NFTs have been used mainly in fields such as art and music as a technology for expressing ownership of digital assets. This time, the ANA Group will apply NFT to the aviation industry”. As its inaugural step, ANA GranWhale will debut aerial photographer Luke Ozawa’s first-ever digital photo in his career as an NFT with an asking price of JPY100,000 ($910). The second installment, starting on 7 June, will feature a 3-D model NFT conversion of the first special paint Boeing 787 aircraft launched by ANA. The NFT marketplace’s development began last August as part of ANA’s vision of building a Web3 virtual travel platform.
Fed inspires Astar Network to revamp tokenomics
Sota Watanabe, the founder of Japanese blockchain Astar (ASTR) Network, expressed his desire to revamp the protocol’s tokenomics on 28 May. Watanabe proposed mirroring the Federal Reserve’s meeting decisions every quarter or every six months and updating the blockchain’s token inflation rate on a variety of factors, stating that “decentralising one of the roles of the FED can be a challenge but also an interesting trial”. The crypto executive said he wished to either fix ASTR’s total supply and make the inflation rate smaller and smaller such as in Bitcoin, or automatically decide the inflation rate based on network usage, as in Ethereum, or use a mix of both models. A multichain decentralised application proposal, Astar recently launched the second iteration of its smart contracts supporting both Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) WebAssembly Virtual Machine (WASM VM) on its mainnet.
