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.

This week, Wanxiang Blockchain hosted its annual Shanghai Blockchain Week, an event usually held by government, corporate, academic and the dough Side of the industry to celebrate how far decentralized technology has come.

This year was very different as the recent wave of regulations pushed the degens out of the spotlight. That didn’t stop them from throwing their private parties, but it was a big change from previous years when almost every major project, VC, exchange, and media group had glitzy all-you-can-eat-and-drink events at landmarks hosted venues across Shanghai.

Vitalik expresses his thoughts on the need to further improve the infrastructure

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin attended the main event via video and gave his usual deep insights into the development of Ethereum. Similar to the speeches he recently gave at other Ethereum events, he talked about how Ethereum can be developed through Layer 2 scaling.

Layer-2 projects like Near, Avalanche, Polygon, and Arbitrum have spent a lot of time cultivating Chinese-speaking ecosystems in hopes of tapping into a large user population who don’t have as many ideological concerns about decentralization as their Western counterparts. Buterin also took part in a panel with two others who successfully sparked interest in China, Juan Benet from Filecoin and Dominik Williams from Dfinity.

Playing hard to come by

A few large events were available for evening visitors, but most were by invitation only. An event with the title “Degen Night” caused a stir because the organizers deliberately did without the location and the person. Invited persons were contacted anonymously and asked to keep their location secret. The poster indicated that the OHM, SPELL, TIME and KLIMA communities would likely be well represented.

This event required a very exclusive invitation to participate, and the organizers were bound to secrecy

MAODAO, a China-supported community of play-to-earn players and NFT fans, also hosted an exclusive event. As with the other events, the DAO waited until the last day to reveal the location, and only on the Discord channel. Owning a Ready Player Cat NFT was stated as a requirement for entry, but it was not stated how strictly this was enforced.

China’s leading NFT and gaming DAO hosted an exclusive meeting

In general, the week didn’t feel as much like meeting old friends as it had in previous years. It’s hard to say how much of this is due to regulation and how much is due to the strong market conditions that are watering down the scene with newer players.

Ranking of the exchanges

Huobi continued to slide Behind FTX this week is now only around 60% of the volume. Last month, Huobi announced that it would close Chinese accounts in late 2021, which may cut off a large chunk of its active user base.

Judging by volumes, OKEx and FTX seem to benefit the most from this. Huobi’s HT token also had a tough year in 2021 and is now trading at less than $ 10, a steep drop from its May high of $ 35.

Another strong performer is Gate.io, an exchange with roots in China that threatens to lose its tier 2 status. On Thursday it showed over $ 7.5 billion 24 hour volume, which puts it on par with the leading Korean exchange, Upbit, and ranks seventh overall. Memecoins fans will be pleased that around 20% of this volume comes from the leading duo Shiba Inu and Dogecoin.

Spill to Hong Kong

Hong Kong is apparently becoming a hotbed for OTC trading counters to an article by Rachel Wolfson on Cointelegraph. Wolfson described how many of them have their own physical locations and use a use case to help build trust with users, including Chinese tourists.

The only barrier facing this booming industry is an upcoming regulatory framework that is currently being considered. If Hong Kong is to follow the path Beijing took earlier this year, it could have a big impact on the city’s crypto industry. This would likely give Singapore an even bigger boost, where many big crypto players have already taken regulatory refuge.