This weekly roundup of news from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong attempts to collect the most important news in the industry, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations.
Top of the food chain
This probably won't surprise anyone in the crypto industry, but Binance founder CZ has been crowned the world's richest Chinese person. The list appeared in Caijing magazine, a Beijing-based financial publication.
CZ was credited with a net worth of around $ 90 billion, a huge leap over former richest Chinese man Zhong Shanshan, a bottled water mogul worth around $ 66 billion. CZ's source of wealth was listed as Binance, a company that has disagreed with Chinese regulators and is now often banned by internet search engines in the country. In fact, many average citizens in China have probably never heard of CZ before seeing this list.
Interestingly, CZ's location was listed as Singapore, making it the only person in the top five not to be found in China. Ironically, being on this list is probably not something to celebrate for people in China, as this year has seen a harsh crackdown on the super rich.
Rounding out the top five list are 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 fringes 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 starting to take shape. The Shanghai photo showed several of the team's early members posing in the hallway of an office building, long before the organization swelled to thousands of members and Binance became a powerhouse in the Fintech space.
Also in the photo was a young Vitalik Buterin, singing karaoke songs in Chinese while raising investments for Ethereum. These images are proof that four years in crypto can be very rewarding, but it can also age a person tremendously.
Four years ago, CZ from #Binance he was busy getting investments. Ethereum @VitalikButerin sings Chinese songs in China.
At that time, no one will know that @cz_binance will become the richest man in China and #Ethereum it will have a great impact on the world. pic.twitter.com/hwKX1FZRKJ
- BlockBeats (@BlockBeatsChina) December 1, 2021
Future of SocialFi is in English only
Monaco was the project that made the headlines of the week, with the decentralized social network provoking users with a touch of lucrative airdrop. Inviting users, gaining followers, and gaining likes were all ways for users to increase their allowance in the airdrop, along with ownership of Opensea's cartoon yacht NFTs. This naturally sparked a wave of users who signed up and shared their invite codes through Chinese encryption channels on social media.
After signing up, pornographic and sexually explicit content became an easy way for users to accumulate followers and likes, prompting one user to point out that instead of SocialFi, the platform should be classified as PornFi. The big twist was when Monaco announced on Twitter that only English content would be counted for content mining:
โPlease note that only English content will be counted as content mining, and content quality is also a key aspect of content mining measurement. Spam and advertising that follows without any organic creation will NOT be counted in content mining "
This received more than 500 comments on Twitter, and many Chinese users reacted angrily. Another twist was soon revealed when a user pointed out that the base code was returning error messages in Chinese. A search of the Whois database even revealed that the company had been registered in Beijing, further amusing or, in some cases, infuriating users.
Despite early PR difficulties, Monaco is emerging as an interesting player on the SocialFi scene. Backed by the famous Three Arrows Capital, the social media network allows users to register and display their NFT collection just by using a MetaMask wallet. With the amount of hype that the Metaverse and SocialFi apps are getting around the world, Monaco could take advantage of smart tokenomics and a smooth user experience to build an active user base.
Huobi headlines
On November 30, Huobi founder Du Jun saying Bloomberg that Huobi Group has chosen Singapore as its regional headquarters. After leaving China, it has been a bumpy road for the historic exchange. On November 25, Huobi launched MonoX Finance's MONO token on Huobi Primelist, a launch pad for new tokens. Five days later, the MonoX smart contract platform was hacked for $ 31 million in ETH and other tokens. Needless to say, new MONO buyers on Huobi won't be happy to see the token's price drop more than 30% in the first week of existence.
