GCR

Quote of the week

“A trend you will start to seeing in the next 3–6 month in Asia is that, in these large tech companies in Korea, Japan, China, they will come up with their so called “blockchain solutions”. Most of these are private blockchains, but they have the keys to 300mn to 500mn people, and they will onboard these hundreds of millions of people onto what they say is the blockchain.

This is something I’ve been thinking about, which is the entire crypto space around the world is more or less around 60mn people currently, and we have come to recognize that Bitcoin is crypto and Ethereum is crypto, and that it means a distributed ledger. But I think these conversations will be challenged in the 3–6 months by these big companies saying “no no no, that’s not blockchain”, THIS is “blockchain”. And their perspective of blockchain may actually be much different. “

-One of the many great insights from Benny Giang, co-founder of Cryptokitties, during his conversation with Global Coin Research. Save the podcast now so you won’t forget to listen to it. We also have the conversation slightly less edited in video, available on Youtube.

Top Clicked Links and News from This Past Week

Lots of EOS discussions and noise this past week. An EOS producer got threatened with a lawsuit for not updating his config and CTO Larimer is proposing to remove the entire EOS constitution and coming out with a V2.

Korea has revealed a new crypto regulatory framework and guidelines pertaining to AML and KYC requirements for exchanges. It’s investigating into three major banks and having banks alert suspicious fund movements to avoid the “kimchi premium” from happening. It also believes that its real-name system have been effective in reducing the “kimchi premium”.

Ministry of Science and ICT of South Korea is investing over $200mn USD into blockchain development, including areas of electronic document distributions between countries, marine logistics, real estate, voting, and also in companies building Blockchain as a Service. The tone lately seems to be changing to be more blockchain focused, similar to what China has done.

Ant Financial launched a blockchain-powered, real-time transfer of cash service between individuals in Hong Kong and the Philippines (going back to my point about buying China tech companies shares/ETF to get exposure to China crypto…) BABA also filed a patent that showed its exploring the use of blockchain technology to speed up international payments. We expect more partnership announcements to happen soon.

Huobi made alot of announcements this week. It didn’t get a license to operate in Japan but is opening a London office in a move into the European market. It is also working with JD.com’s cloud arm to build blockchain-based technology and applications. JD most recently was supported by the Chinese gov’t to create asset backed tokens.

?Japan forbidded Huobi and KuCoin exchanges from operating locally. But one of its largest tech companies and messaging app Line is launching its own exchange supporting 30 cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, ethereum and litecoin for a trading fee of 0.1%.

The new Indian regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies is likely to be presented in the first half of July.

Hey there

This upcoming week, Joyce from Global Coin Research will be at the Techcrunch’s Blockchain conference in Zug from Wednesday to Friday. Guests will include Vitalik and CZ. If you happen to be there too, we would love to meet! And if you haven’t known about this before, follow us on Twitter as we will be sharing live highlights, selfies and takeaways from the conference.