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

Top of the food chain

This probably won’t surprise anyone in the crypto industry, but the founder of Binance CZ has been crowned the richest Chinese in the world. The list appeared in Caijing Magazine, a financial publication based in Beijing.

CZ has been credited with net worth of around $ 90 billion, a huge leap above former wealthy Chinese Zhong Shanshan, a bottled water mogul valued at around $ 66 billion. The source of CZ’s wealth was listed as Binance, a company that was not on par with Chinese regulators and is now often banned by internet search engines within the country. In fact, many average citizens in China likely never heard of CZ before seeing this list.

Interestingly, CZ’s location was listed as Singapore, making him the only person in the top five who is not based in China. Ironically, China’s people are unlikely to be celebrating being on this list as the crackdown on the super-rich took place this year.

Who? Most Chinese citizens will see CZ’s name for the first time. Source: Caijing Magazine

The top 5 list was rounded off with the founder of Bytedance and TikTok, a manufacturer of electric car batteries, and Pony Ma, the founder of Tencent. The real question should be what other early crypto whales from China might be on the edge of this list, even if their wealth is not publicly known.

Media company BlockBeats posted a photo of CZ from 4 years ago when Binance was taking shape. The Shanghai photo showed a number of early team members posing in a hallway of an office building long before the organization grew to thousands of members and Binance became such a powerhouse in the fintech space.

Also pictured was a young Vitalik Buterin singing Chinese karaoke songs while raising investments for Ethereum. These images are proof that four years in cryptocurrencies can be very rewarding, but it can also age a person enormously.

Four years ago, CZ of #Binance was busy making investments. Ethereums @VitalikButerin sings Chinese songs in China.

Nobody will know at this point @cz_binance becomes the richest man in China and #Ether will have such a big impact on the world. pic.twitter.com/hwKX1FZRKJ

– BlockBeats (@BlockBeatsChina) December 1, 2021

The Future of SocialFi is only available in English

Monaco was the headline-grabbing project of the week, with the decentralized social network teasing users by pointing out a lucrative airdrop. Inviting users, gaining followers, and getting likes were ways for users to increase their allotment in the Airdrop, along with owning cartoon yacht NFTs from Opensea. This, of course, resulted in a deluge of users signing up and sharing their invitation codes via Chinese crypto channels on social media.

After signing up, pornographic and sexually explicit content became an easy way for users to farm followers and likes, which resulted in a user pointing out that the platform should be categorized as PornFi instead of SocialFi. The big twist came when Monaco announced on Twitter that only English content would be counted for content mining:

“Please note that only English content is counted as content mining and that content quality is also an important aspect of content mining measurement. Spamming and advertising follow without organic creation.

This received over 500 comments on Twitter, with many Chinese users reacting angrily. Another twist was soon revealed when a user pointed out that the code base was returning error messages in Chinese. A whois database search even found the company was registered in Beijing, which added amusement to users or, in some cases, angered users.

Yacht parties galore: Monaco users can show off their colorful NFTs on social media. Source: Opensea

Despite the early PR difficulties, Monaco is developing into an interesting player in the social-fi scene. Backed by the infamous Three Arrows Capital, the social media network allows users to sign up and showcase their NFT collection simply by using a MetaMask wallet. With the amount of advertising that Metaverse and SocialFi applications are spreading around the world, Monaco could potentially leverage clever tokenomics and a smooth user experience to build an active user base.

Headlines from Huobi

On November 30th, Huobi founder Du Jun told Bloomberg that The Huobi Group has chosen Singapore as its regional headquarters. After leaving China, it was a bumpy road for the historic exchange. On November 25, Huobi launched MonoX Finance’s MONO token on Huobi Primelist, a launchpad for new tokens. Five days later, the MonoX smart contract platform for ETH and other tokens worth $ 31 million was hacked. Needless to say, new MONO buyers on Huobi won’t be happy if the token price drops more than 30% in the first week of its existence.