FinTech news in China category

As a 1:1 fully collateralized stablecoin backed by offshore Chinese yuan, CNHC needs approval from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and is obliged to submit audit reports at the local government’s request, the company told journalist. Circle Ventures, the venture arm of the USDC issuer Circle, has invested in an offshore Chinese yuan-backed stablecoin project, CNHC.

In light of the downfall of centralized crypto services like FTX, Gemini and Babel itself, Yang is touting Hope, which blends centralized finance (CeFi), decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance (TradFi), to deliver the kind of transparency and security that come with DeFi but provide the easy access offered by CeFi.

The officials said the Ministry of Home Affairs has received reports of cybercrimes where Chinese firms have access to some Indian lending apps through APIs, which they are using to store Indian consumers’ data outside of the country, the source said. The IT Ministry is concerned about the historic or current presence of Chinese investors on the cap tables of some lending apps in India, the officials said, according to a source familiar with the matter. The officials said on Tuesday that some apps are also getting impacted because of their sketchy loan-collection practices and customer services, according to the source, addressing a longstanding pain point of Indian consumers. The Indian government also banned dozens of apps including ByteDance’s TikTok, Xiaomi’s Community and Video Call apps and Alibaba Group’s UC Browser and UC News in mid-2020.

The parent firm Huobi Group now operates an umbrella of crypto-related entities, including its flagship exchange Huobi Global, its venture capital arm Huobi Ventures and a crypto cloud service. Huobi Global announced today that its controlling shareholder has completed the transaction to sell its entire stake to About Capital, a Hong Kong-based fund management firm started by Ted Chen, who founded China’s hedge fund giant Greenwoods Asset Management. Huobi Global, once China top crypto exchange, has been retooling itself since exiting from the home market following Beijing’s crypto ban. Founded in 2013, Huobi Global rode China’s crypto boom before Beijing declared all crypto transactions illegal in 2021.

While crypto mining, the process that verifies and adds new transactions to the blockchain using the proof-of-work method, is costly to join and prone to regulatory clampdown, crypto staking, enabled by the Merge, offers enhanced censorship resistance thanks to its low barriers to entry both in terms of cost and the computing power required. The Merge, the much-anticipated network update on Ethereum that’s slated to unfold this week, could provide a new way for China’s crypto enthusiasts to participate in the blockchain economy two years after the country began phasing out the lucrative crypto mining industry. Before China banned crypto mining, the country accounted for as much as two-thirds of Bitcoin’s worldwide hash power, the energy consumed to carry out proof-of-work. Big hopes for the upcoming Ethereum Merge Users who are more crypto-savvy could opt for decentralized protocols, which use algorithms to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions rather than relying on a centralized intermediary, allowing for a higher degree of anonymity.

A major motivation behind launching Symbolic for Nailwal was the opportunity to more formally support companies that are already in his orbit, he said, adding that he doesn’t feel he will have to spend much extra time managing the fund because it will help him realize synergies from relationships he’s already building, in part through Polygon’s own venture fund. Symbolic plans to primarily back companies building consumer-facing decentralized apps (dApps), Nailwal said, a move that seems aligned with Polygon’s own goal to speed up web3 app development. Now, the protocol co-founder Sandeep Nailwal is launching another project, he told journalist exclusively — this time, in the form of Symbolic Capital, a venture capital fund built by and for web3 founders. One key differentiator for Symbolic will be its internal data platform the firm has built to support its portfolio companies as well as to bolster its own diligence process, Nailwal said.

Other investors in the round include PrimeBlock Ventures, M77 Ventures, ShataCapital, Kryptos, Antalpha Ventures, Waterdrip Capital, 7 O’Clock Capital, Misa Zhu, founder of AR glasses maker Rokid and Fan Zhang, a former co-founder of Sequoia Capital China. Other startups are also using MPC to enable distributed signing of crypto transactions, but Wang pointed to the fact that Safeheron is open-sourced, which gives its clients more transparency into its source codes. Since its product launch in October, Safeheron has powered over 20 clients, which altogether have more than $100 million in cryptocurrencies under custody and have facilitated more than $4 billion worth of transactions using Safeheron’s wallet as a service, according to Wang. Private keys, critical to decentralized crypto apps, let individuals take control over their digital assets through self-custody wallets rather than leaving control to a centralized institution.

Four Tencent veterans want their offering .bit, an identity protocol built on the blockchain, to become the universal identification system in web3, like how emails and phone numbers became ubiquitous in Web 2.0, while giving users control over their own data rather than letting it reside in the platforms they use. The strategy won investor support as the company has closed a Series A funding round of $13 million led by CMB International, which is owned by the Chinese conglomerate China Merchants Group, HashKey Capital, known for its early investment in Ethereum, QingSong Fund, GSR Ventures, GGV Capital and crypto-focused investment firm SNZ. On Jike, a social network favored by China’s tech workers, venture capitalists and web3 enthusiasts, people are attaching the .bit suffix to their names even if they haven’t actually registered an account with the platform. The company’s next ambition is to promote the use of .bit for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), said Yeoh.

China billionaire tech boss Jack Ma plans to cede control of Ant Group, the fintech powerhouse closely affiliated with Alibaba, the e-commerce giant he founded, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Ant informed regulators of Ma’s intention to relinquish control as the company prepared to transition into a financial holding company, The Wall Street Journal reported. The pair has been symbiotic, with Ant’s Alipay app deeply integrated into Alibaba’s suite of retail services and its financial services touted to business owners on Alibaba’s marketplaces. Ant started out as a payments processor of Alibaba, which Ma, at the time the e-commerce firm’s CEO, spun out in 2011.

The latest close marks the first time that BAI Capital has brought in external limited partners, including sovereign wealth funds, large insurance companies, internet giants, funds of funds, on top of capital from its parent Bertelsmann.

Pow, who worked at Ox Labs, a decentralized exchange protocol builder, and his co-founder Hongzi Mao, a computer science Ph.D. from MIT, have created a desktop tool that uses machine learning algorithms to turn still avatars into motion-tracked ones. Available as a Chrome extension, Hologram swaps out Pow’s real video feed with the cat avatar.

In April, China’s top financial industry associations proposed that NFTs must not be used for securitization; nor should they be traded with cryptocurrencies, which have been outlawed in the country.

With a fresh $42 million in its coffer, the firm plans to invest in the “social ecosystem” of web3, a version of the internet built largely on blockchain that promises to be more decentralized.

We spoke to a dozen Chinese founders and investors to find out how this group is trying to build global web3 businesses while still keeping their roots in China and taking advantage of the home country’s abundant tech talent

Digital collectible platforms, according to the proposal issued by Tencent, Ant Group, and others, should hold relevant regulatory permits, ensure the security of underlying blockchain technologies, enforce user real-identity checks, step up intellectual property protection, resolutely ban financial speculations, and promote rational consumption among users.

The crypto hash rate, which measures the computational power used by proof-of-work cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, in China plummeted to zero between last July and August after the country carried out the harshest crackdown on crypto mining.

While much of the deep, fundamental research and infrastructure development in the blockchain space still takes place in the US, Southeast Asia is ideal for web3 startups offering consumer-facing services, said Amy Zhao, lead at crypto investment firm Ocular.

For one, it’s working on a price stabilization mechanism to ensure the cost of its coins is always at a rate that the shoes are affordable for new users but also not so cheap that existing users lack the incentives to mint new shoes, that is, create new shoes on the blockchain and sell. Since its launch in December, StepN, an app that lets users walk and run to earn tokens, has quickly become a household name in the play-to-earn blockchain gaming, or GameFi, world.

CyberConnect plans to generate revenues through the social data network, which include different participants like data contributors, indexers and recommenders, curators, and users.

Terraform Labs, the organization behind UST, cryptocurrency Luna and Luna Foundation Guard, emptied its treasury wallet of all of its bitcoin, about 42,530 bitcoin, or $1.3 billion, on Monday.

Binance, the world largest crypto exchange by volume, has gained regulatory approval to provide digital asset services in France, the first European country where it has acquired such permission, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. Binance has been busy trying to show European regulators its commitment to practice compliance and promote the region’s blockchain ecosystem. Many Chinese-founded crypto firms have moved their core management to Singapore, which is quickly emerging as a regional hub for blockchain startups. Originally founded in China, Binance has largely pulled out of the country following Beijing’s sweeping crypto ban.

Unlike NFTs that are minted on Ethereum or other public chains and traded with crypto on open marketplaces, digital collectibles issued in China are minted on permissioned blockchains managed by local tech giants and often sold on these companies’ own channels.

PayU, as a provider and builder of fintech solutions, will be able to leverage Treinta as a channel for getting its own customer-facing tech deeper into the market in Colombia and the rest of Latin America, but Treinta will also become another retail channel for PayU’s under-the-hood technology.

While Alipay focuses on China’s domestic consumers and merchants, its sister Alipay+ appears to be Ant’s ambition to go after users outside China who have similar cross-border payments needs.

The verdict that China web3 community has been waiting for months is here: NFTs, or the tokens used to prove the ownership and authenticity of an item, must not be used for securitization or transacted in cryptocurrencies, said China’s banking, securities and internet financial associations in an announcement on Wednesday.

After a decade at Alibaba and its fintech affiliate giant Ant Group, Max Ma founded SwooshTransfer in 2021 to facilitate cross-border payments for small- and medium-sized enterprises, as well as individuals such as overseas students, for whom tuition payments are often a hassle.

It was helping mid-size startups keep track of equity as they grew, but last summer, as the price of Bitcoin shot to a historic high, the company began getting requests from its clients to help manage employee tokens. The company declined to mention how many customers it’s servicing but said Hong Kong-based microinsurance firm YAS Digital and crypto gaming company Animoca Brands are among its early users. Sprout created Folium in light of this customer demand to help companies trace digital coins and non-fungible tokens across various blockchain platforms.

Riogrande plans to have about 30 brands under its umbrella.

Nestcoin raises $6.45M pre-seed to accelerate crypto and web3 adoption in Africa and frontier markets Educating Africa’s young population about web3 and decentralization seems to be a correlating theme with recent web3 upstarts in Africa.