GCR

In case you missed it, we had a very well-received conference call with MakerDao’s China lead Chao Pan. Given all the interest and demand, we have released the replay as a podcast today in lieu of our usual Saturday cadence. I encourage you all to listen to it in Soundcloud, iTunes, or Overcast. 

Chao lives in Shanghai and has been leading MakerDao’s presence in China for about a year and half. In the call, we talked about a variety of topics including his conversation with regulators on building China’s digital currency, Maker’s local partnerships, and we also answered a number of questions raised by our Twitter followers. Here are my top 8 takeaways from the call, but be sure to listen to the whole audio because it’s fascinating to hear from Chao’s perspective.

My Top 8 Takeaways from the Call

1.The regulators from the Chinese central government are actively engaging with a digital RMB. The regulators have had conversations with stablecoin projects. Historically, their approach to adopting any innovation themselves is to observe how things play out in private corporates first before they launch their own. Many local Chinese folks I’ve spoken to are very aware of this ongoing dialogue around China’s digital currency but there doesn’t seem to be so much awareness or recognition of such happenings outside of the country. Checkout our recent coverage of Huobi’s CEO making the argument for why the Chinese government should support a digital currency. .

2. China is the second largest market for Maker, with about 1/3 of the total volume of the US. Chao and I talked about how China traditionally has been Bitcoin and mining heavy, that is still the case, but there has been an increase in size and interest in Ethereum as well.

3. MakerDao has been working closely with ImToken, which is the largest crypto wallet in the world with about 7mn downloads since last released numbers in August 2018 . ImToken is not very known outside of China and Asia because the CEO, Ben He, is purposefully avoiding the western hemisphere as a focus market. I had an interview with him in Chinese where he alluded to that, and you can see their latest stats and listen to the interview.

As for Maker, they’ve partnered with ImToken to allow Chinese Ethereum holders to create CDPs directly from their ImToken wallets. Furthermore, what I think is more interesting is that they are working on a partnership to allow ImToken users to make e-commerce purchases through their wallet (similar to how WeChat Pay already has that function). And by using Dai, customers can get a discount to their purchases. This is similar to the Terra model, which is another stablecoin company from Korea that I recently interviewed with a primary focus on the e-commerce market.

4. In their 3–5 year plan, MakerDao plans to release multi-collateral Dai, and then also Dai derivatives from the Chinese fiat currency and other national fiat currencies. Chao seemed to have alluded that they have already communicated with the Chinese regulators around this topic and I think they have quite the foresight to start engaging with regulators early on.

5. MakerDao is the leading topic amongst most decentralized finance discussions in China. We are not seeing native and local decentralized finance projects coming out of China right now, and I think that’s partially due to that China historically has lagged the west in terms of financial infrastructure and sophistication of financial offerings. Many of the trends in China and Asia in crypto ecosystem development are around e-commerce, exchanges and new business innovations on top (i.e. IEOs), permissioned blockchains, and stablecoins.

6. EOS’s popularity in China. Chao and I talked about EOS’s popularity in China and how people are playing on the gambling platform to arbitrage bet. When people like Mike Dudas, the founder of the Block, one of most popular English crypto media publication, tweet that “no one cares about EOS”. It makes me really puzzled, and almost like worried.

Regardless whether you like EOS or not, and I think unfortunately it is quite centralized at the moment with many of the block producers being Chinese and based in China, EOS is literally one of the most popular coins in Asia. Most of the “applications” are gambling apps and wallets as far as I know, but from the weekly updates, it looks like different EOS BPS are laying the groundwork for development and partnerships in different regions. Additionally, to highlight its popularity in China, the most read tech publication from China, 36kr, equivalent to that of Techcrunch in the US, releases a weekly report on EOS. It is also the only other altcoin that ImToken’s wallet supports besides Ethereum and BTC. EOSLaoMao, for example, one of the largest BPs, used to publish weekly updates in Chinese.

7. Chinese projects that Chao mentioned that are making good progress in China: ImToken, Nervos and DDEX

8. Foreign projects that Chao mentioned that are making good progress in China– he mentioned that the number has dwindled significantly in the last year, but highlights UMA, EOS, Ethereum, Kyber Networks

I’m sure this is not all, be sure to listen to the full audio in Soundcloud, iTunes, Overcast.