April 10, 2020
Greetings from the COVID-19 hot spot New York City! Through April 9, New York State had confirmed COVID-19 cases 159,937, New York City 87,028 cases, and statewide fatalities reached 7,067. Our heart goes out to the families who lost loved ones and to the healthcare personnel who risk their own lives to save lives.
Stay home, stay safe.
Investments
Three Arrows Capital, a Singapore-based Hedge fund, founded by Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, took over the shares owned by Able Partners and became an equity investor in BlockFi. Able Partners invested in BlockFi in Series A. See the report.
Binance acquired CoinMarketCap for an estimated $300 million (definitely not $400 million as reported) in equity and BNB. Some Asian cryptocurrency investors express their concern in the independence of CoinMarketCap and its trustworthiness after the acquisition. The founder and CEO of CoinMarketCap Brandon Chez passed the baton to Singaporean Carylyne Chan. See the report.
Blockchain Use Cases
OneConnect Financial Technology, under Ping An Insurance, is partnering with Merchants Port Group, a conglomerate headquartered in Hong Kong, to develop a DLT-based logistics platform serving the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Bay Area. IPOed in New York Stock Exchange, OneConnect’s backers include Ping An Insurance and Softbank. See the report.
Regulations - Japan, a would-be Safe Haven of Crypto?
What applies to the traditional capital markets such as maintaining minimum capital requirement and net assets level is being adopted by Japanese regulators for crypto-asset exchanges. In addition, if a foreign exchange wants to apply for an exchange license in Japan, it is required to have obtained a license from its home country with compatible regulatory criteria. See the report.
The East Meets the West
ConsenSys has a reseller partner of the Enterprise Ethereum in Japan
Hitachi Solutions, an IT company under Hitachi Group, a Japanese conglomerate, reached an agreement to partner with ConsenSys to market PegaSys Plus, a commercial application of Enterprise Ethereum in Japan through reseller agreement.
“I’m thrilled to be able to announce the partnership between Hitachi Solutions and ConsenSys. We think Japan has the potential to be one of the fastest-growing blockchain markets in the world over the coming years, and I am eager to drive that growth with Hitachi. We are committed to bringing our stack of products to Japan and working with the best partner possible to make Japan a global leader in the space,” said ConsenSys Founder and CEO Joseph Lubin. See the report.
Recap of March 12, the Black Swan Day
In this video interview participated by companies from the U.S. and Asia, BlockFi, HashKey Capital, Paradigm.co, Curv.co, Amber Group and Three Arrows Capital, the panelists shared their first-hand experience and observations of March 12, the day when both traditional and crypto markets went through cascading downward movements and extreme volatility.
As CEO and Co-founder of BlockFi Zac Prince pointed out there had been a lot of money moving from U.S. based lenders into China-based lending platforms. These platforms used their clients’ bitcoin as collateral to borrow from companies like BlockFi and Genesis. About a month before March 12, market makers and hedge funds started outfitting Chinese lending platforms by paying a 20% interest rate (for bitcoin) to arbitrage the contango developing in the futures market (of bitcoin), widening the spread of futures. This somehow caused a shortage of US dollars available to Chinese lending platforms and to some miners, forcing some (holders of bitcoin) to sell earlier than they would have otherwise had to if there wouldn’t have been the lack of supply (of dollar). Eventually, the sales cascaded as some lenders and exchanges went into liquidation mode.
Blockchain Asia covers exclusively blockchain developments in Asia, including regulations, investments, new deals and company highlights. It is owned by Kee Global Advisors. For previous posts, please visit here.