GCR

What Crypto News insiders are reading on Asia.

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Top News in Asia from Wednesday to Saturday

China’s regulator updates its crypto ranking for the 7th time — BTC upgraded from the 19th place in the previous month to the 13th place, EOS continues to occupy the top position of the overall ranking, followed by Ethereum: http://bit.ly/2zzszx1

Binance Info Gold Label Project aims to protect the blockchain community by encouraging projects themselves to update and maintain project-related information, alleviating the risk from information asymmetry. http://bit.ly/2KK5zQh

Dan Larimer from EOS is reportedly working on a “token that would be immutable, nonprogrammable, and limited to a currency role.” http://bit.ly/2KOhAE0

Coinshares, a crypto research firm, estimates that 77.6% of bitcoin mining uses renewable energy and part of the answer lies in Sichuan, China. https://on.mktw.net/2KMasZ1

Bitcoin mining firm Canaan Creative temporarily cut prices across all of its crypto mining devices to $200 each in amidst bitcoin prices rebounding. http://bit.ly/2KSstVL

SV Insight Research’s and Dapp dot com latest report on the “State of the Dapps” show that Chinese developers are leading the decentralized app charts with their gambling dApps.

Coin and Token News

Consensys works with Philippines to have its Manila residents paid in Ethereum for cleaning up Philippines’ polluted beaches: http://bit.ly/2DUrGSz

ICON Team received the Korean ‘Minister of Science and ICT (MSIT) Award’ in recognition of its contributions to the development and popularization of the blockchain industry in Korea. http://bit.ly/2BL8GVa

Steemit, Inc. is close to going belly-up and laid off 70% of their staff. http://bit.ly/2BK365f

Deals and Funds

Former Huobi CTO James Ju is launching a cryptocurrency exchange by the end the yearin Singapore. The exchange, which will be called BHEX, raised $15 million in equity from OKEx and Huobi, DHVC, Dfund, BlockVC and Genesis Capital: http://bit.ly/2U2Zy5l

TRON announced its plans to launch a blockchain gaming fund dubbed TRON Arcade,$100 million over the next three years: http://bit.ly/2E7NzhZ

Pundi X is partnering Singapore-based Quantum Energy Asset Management to launch a $100-million blockchain fund in January 2019. http://bit.ly/2KK3i7q

Exchange News

KuCoin, Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange collaborated with Simplex to enable its user to purchase cryptocurrencies using their credit and debit cards. http://bit.ly/2KNFaB0

OKEx’s new Piggybank product enable hodlers to lend their fund as margin loans to margin traders. http://bit.ly/2KKkkCn

Huobi US launched the first exchange billboard campaign in San Francisco. As part of the campaign, HBUS will eliminate all trading fees throughout the end of the year.http://bit.ly/2KMbsfR

Regulation News

India and Russia are to cooperate in blockchain amongst other tech areas, and both countries are increasingly looking towards utilizing blockchain’s potential within fintech and other sectors. http://bit.ly/2zDmUWB

South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT will develop a blockchain voting system that will go on trial in the private sector in December. https://zd.net/2BK9qcZ

Malaysian Finance Minister has revealed that a new set of comprehensive regulations guiding the activities of crypto exchanges and ICOs will come into effect in Q1 2019.http://bit.ly/2rh3h1U

Business News

Bitmain has launched a new cryptocurrency index as a benchmark for investors with a real-time spot price that is updated every second, and a daily reference price that is published once a day: http://bit.ly/2DUCBvs

A Chinese cryptocurrency company plans to introduce a so-called “digital peso” inPhillipines next year to serve not only overseas Filipino workers but also Chinese nationals working here in the Philippines. http://bit.ly/2KMfbKm

Taiwan-based tech giant Asus is now letting gamers use their GPUs to earn passive income when not being used for other PC tasks. Earnings will be paid out via PayPal or WeChat:http://bit.ly/2SmyKeF

The Japanese arm of computer giant Microsoft has partnered with nascent blockchain startup LayerX to “accelerate” uptake of the technology: http://bit.ly/2U64Nky

Japanese video platform c0ban.tv pays users its own cryptocurrency to watch ads and it has started its expansion into English-speaking markets: http://bit.ly/2P9M9EN

In case you missed it

10 Most Popular Asia Crypto Articles of November- Bitmain, Binance and BTCC

Our latest podcast and transcript is out with Yusuke Obinata, aka Obi, founder of CryptoAge.

In this episode, Joyce Yang from Global Coin Research is joined by Yusuke Obinata, aka Obi, founder of CryptoAge. Obi is deeply involved with the Blockchain community in Japan, and he has been helping multiple US blockchain projects go to market in Japan including Cryptokitties, Quantstamp, and Kadena. Through CryptoAge, Obi organizes frequent, large size developer meetups in Tokyo. He is also the lead organizer of NodeTokyo 2018, the first kind of blockchain developer conference in Tokyo.

In this podcast, Obi and Joyce discuss the latest regulatory sentiment towards crypto in Japan, the growing blockchain developers ecosystem and how he advises projects in the US to go to market there.

Our Weekly Report on the State of Asia Cryptocurrency and Blockchain

As mentioned last week, based on our reader feedback, we are introducing a new weekly series to contextualize and analyze the latest happenings in Asia. So far we have come up with 4 high-level topics, and every week we will be writing about one of these topics, and rotating through them in the following order.

• China (providing commentary on recent regulatory trends, media sentiment, and touching on exchanges and company developments)
• Asia Countries ex-China (providing commentary on recent regulatory trends, media sentiment, and touching on exchanges and company developments)
• Exchanges And Mining (Binance, Huobi, Upbit, Bitmain, Canaan, etc)
• Crypto Projects and Funding Trends

For this week, we will be publishing our thoughts and resources on the Asia Countries (ex-China) tomorrow. Checkout our writeup last week on China here