At approximately $1 trillion, Bitcoin’s market cap has blown past Tencent, which holds a valuation of roughly $917.8 billion at time of publication, according to AssetDash rankings. Crypto’s largest digital asset is now sixth on AssetDash’s list of top market cap companies across the globe. Google, officially known by its parent entity, Alphabet (GOOGL), holds the fifth spot with a market cap of approximately $1.4 trillion at the time of publication. “After reaching a new all-time high price mark, Bitcoin surpassed Chinese tech giant Tencent, moving it up to the #6 spot in the world among publicly traded companies,” CoinSmart …
Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor's note A wise man once said, "there's security and there're securities," and if he didn't, he should've. In modern English, it seems a quaint coincidence that the word "security" refers to both safety and a broad class of investments. But as pending arguments about, say, meme-propelled trading in securities are set to take place in forums reserved for national security, it's a good reminder that money precedes weapons as vehicles for national power. In some sense, it's obvious that financial …
China has finalized new guidelines to aid in antitrust battle against tech giants. On Feb. 7, the State Administration for Market Regulation released finalized rules for its anti-monopoly push against e-commerce and payments giants like Alibaba, Ant Group and Tencent. The guidance specifically addresses "operators that provide business premises, transaction matching, information exchange and other Internet platform services." It builds on a host of recent efforts by both the SAMR and the People's Bank of China to rein in the broader tech industry, specifically targeting payments platforms as the country continues to push forward its own central bank digital currency. …
Tencent Cloud is joining forces with blockchain company ShareRing to launch a new digital identification system to streamline international travel amid the COVID-19 pandemic. As the South China Morning Post reported Tuesday, ShareRing will combine its distributed ledger technology with Tencent Cloud's services to create a blockchain-based digital identity management platform. Specifically, ShareRing will use Tencent Cloud’s optical character recognition and facial recognition technology to help improve its “self-sovereign identity app.” In its current form, the app can be used to book flights, hotel reservations, car rentals and a variety of other services. In a joint statement, Tencent Cloud and …
The Blockchain Services Network (BSN), the largest blockchain infrastructure initiative in China, now has a unified smart contract programming language. Red Date Technology, a major tech company involved in the BSN's development, will add support for DAML — a smart contract language developed by American blockchain startup Digital Asset. Announcing the news on Sept. 14, the companies’ executives said that DAML will now be the “exclusive standard” for developing decentralized applications, or DApps, on top of the BSN. The integration will enable the interoperability of DApps regardless of the implemented blockchain network. As such, developers will not have to rewrite …
The People’s Bank of China is purportedly planning to use its digital currency electronic system (DCEP) — another moniker for its central bank digital currency — to target the dominance of technology giants like Alibaba and Tencent in the digital payments sector. The report comes only a few days after claims of the central bank prompting a top antitrust agency to launch a probe against Alipay and WeChat Pay for using their dominance to suppress competition. According to the Financial Times, even regulators and executives of Alibaba’s financial group Ant agreed that PBoC will target the market dominance of Alipay …
Chinese tech giant Tencent has revealed its plan for creating a blockchain-based wine traceability platform in collaboration with Changyu, China’s biggest and oldest wine producer, according to local news on July 31. It is said to be a nationwide first for the country’s domestic wine industry. According to Changyu, the platform is designed to trace every step of the wine-making and sales processes, including planting, brewing, distribution and management. It will issue a unique traceable certificate for each bottle of wine it produces. The whole process will be recorded on the blockchain network. The firm’s bottles’ scannable QR codes would …
Days after the CEOs of the world’s top tech firms faced antitrust hearings in the United States Congress, sources are alleging that Beijing too could soon probe its own digital monopolies. A Reuters report published on July 31 cites anonymous sources who claim the People’s Bank of China has formally recommended that the State Council’s antitrust committee launch a probe into the activities of digital payments titans Alipay and WeChat Pay. The central bank has allegedly argued that both have used their ascendant position to stifle any possible competition in the field of digital payments. If approved, an antitrust probe …
The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) is planning to add the Tencent-backed food delivery giant Meituan Dianping to its list of platforms that will test real-world use cases of the digital yuan. Meituan Dianping is a Beijing-based food delivery platform that currently boasts of more than 435 million active users and billions of dollars of daily transactions. This creates a huge opportunity for the mass adoption of the digital yuan, which is also referred to as the Digital Currency Electronic Payment or DCEP. Unnamed sources told Bloomberg that Meituan had been in talks with the research arm of China’s central …
China’s Yunnan province city of Kunming has completed the development and internal testing of the country’s first completely blockchain-based public resource bidding platform. Public resource bidding is a method utilized by governments to allocate large resources to private and public sector companies that promise to complete a particular project. Dubbed “Kunyilian,” the bidding platform utilizes Tencent’s blockchain-as-a-service system and intends to solve the challenges faced by the current public resource bidding process. It is expected to help authenticate the credibility of central entities involved in the bidding process and expedite data sharing and security. During the pilot test of the …
The former vice-chair of the People’s Bank of China’s National Council for Social Security Fund, Wang Zhongmin, announced that China has completed the backend architecture development of China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC). Wang made the announcement during the online 2020 Fintech Forum organized by Tencent Fintech Research Institute and the Fintech 50 Forum in Beijing. With so many cryptocurrencies already in existence and in development, China is seeking to create a payment infrastructure in which these currencies can co-exist with sovereign digital currencies. Wang said that such a system will create an environment in the digital currency space for …
Tencent has been expanding its research into blockchain, with the firm registering a series of patents detailing distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based solutions for fund management, and advertising. Chinese media outlet Egsea reported the patents on June 18, noting that the filings also included blockchain-based consumer applications, hardware devices, and media storage systems. The recent filings come as blockchain sees increasing enterprise adoption in the areas of cloud, artificial intelligence and internet-of-things (IoT). Tencent continues amassing DLT patents The new filings will extend Tencent’s presumed dominance in the number of blockchain patents held. In April, media outlet China Banking News reported …