This weekly roundup of news from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong attempts to curate top industry news, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and blockchain integrations in businesses.

Regulatory noise

In this week’s column, the Shanghai man is determined to put all regulatory noise into one section so as not to waste too much time. Let’s begin.

It wasn’t much, just a warning from the Hebei provincial government announce it would put an end to cryptocurrency mining in the region. This is largely a non-story as it is essentially just a re-enactment of a national-level policy that went into effect months ago. Hebei was never a major mining stronghold anyway, so the announcement is more procedural than anything else. Mining continues to move overseas as China pursues its joint efforts to be carbon neutral.

For reference, China has 23 provinces, and nearly half have already reaffirmed their commitment to national politics by announcing that cryptocurrency mining will not be tolerated.

The Securities Times, a government publication, warned the public about the NFT bubble. This Shenzhen-based publication challenged the real economic worth of NFTs, an issue that many of us have all pondered at times. Still, the suspicion hasn’t stopped that the trend is spreading into less mainstream art circles, where NFT and Metaverse-related events are becoming increasingly popular.

Selling shovels in the gold rush

While mining in China may be difficult, mining equipment manufacturing continues to be quite profitable. Canaan, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of cryptocurrency mining hardware, announced his highest quarterly profit to date. The companys Q2 financial data showed the company had total net sales of over $ 167.5 million. This was likely due to the sharp rise in prices this spring, which led to an aggressive expansion of mining facilities around the world. The next round of quarterly financial data will tell a deeper story as investors learn how very aggressive China’s regulations have harmed the industry. Zhang Nangeng, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Canaan, said:

“We had a remarkable performance in the second quarter of 2021. Despite unexpected momentum in regulatory policy and Bitcoin price volatility, we achieved record results as we delivered a robust 5.9 million Thash / s of computing power to our customers.”

Round up the trading floor

As in the past 12 weeks, the volume on exchanges such as Huobi and OKEx remained largely unchanged. The last big spike came during the sell-off in early May, around the time Chinese regulators started cracking down. During this time, FTX has seen a sharp surge in volume, suggesting that some Chinese users are connecting to exchanges that have traditionally not been a dominant player in the Chinese trading space.

FIL remains popular on Huobi and lands in the top 5 of Thursday’s 24-hour volume charts. This token continues to enjoy huge popularity among traders in China, despite being around 50% below its all-time high from earlier this year. ADA, SOL, and DOT were assets that appeared high on the OKEx volume charts that reflected global volume distributions. Speaking of Solana, Chinese users Weibo reacted strongly to the shutdown of the network on Wednesday, with some criticizing the network’s decentralization. A discussion broke out on whether Ethereum’s early technical issues were comparable to this event, proving that Solana and Ethereum maxis disagree in any culture regardless of language.

Unleashing the eCNY

The central bank digital currency created by the Chinese Bundesbank is now be pushed even further, as the popular Meituan app offers approximately $ 1.50 in eCNY (digital yuan) to users who open a “digital wallet” and use its services.

Meituan is best known for its bright yellow food delivery service and shared bikes that can be found on most of the city’s streets. The campaign aims to promote a low-carbon life and is open to nine pilot cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chengdu.

The wallet interface is minimalistic and allows users to convert, deposit, and transfer the eCNY

The eCNY, which was originally positioned more as an institutional transfer instrument for commercial banks, is now being aggressively pushed towards private customers. Large franchises like McDonalds and Zara are already displaying eCNY payment tags at outlets across the country. The current digital payments space is dominated by WeChat Pay and Alipay, but these two will likely have a hard time keeping control of market share if the central government is interested in forcing eCNY into competing uses.

Ironically, Meituan plays a special role in Chinese cryptocurrency meme culture. Token holders often joke that they are forced to work in grocery delivery when the market collapses, resulting in the following meme.

Meituan’s iconic delivery drivers are the source of many crypto-related Memes during a market crash.

Late March, Meituan revealed it had around 570 million users. Other financial apps, including banking apps, have already integrated the wallet services into their products.

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