Mask's Initial Twitter Offering, Poolin's Mars Protocol, Affirm's China Equivalent...and Buddhistic Style?

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Hi, I’m Shuyao Kong 孔姝尧. Da bing is my weekly rumination of worthwhile news happening in China’s crypto ecosystem. I’m particularly passionate about uncovering untold stories and portraying entrepreneurs who are doing cool stuff, all from the eyes of someone who’s both local and international.

Remember: Culture makes people understand each other better.

Weekly Crypto roundup: 

1. Mask Network’s Initial Twitter Offering (ITO), partnered with Loopring

You cannot get a stronger China DeFi partnership than the combo of Mask Network and Loopring. On Jan 10th, Mask Network users can purchase Loopring’s $LRC token at 30% on Twitter. The ITO was supposed to last for 8 hours but sold out in less than 3 minutes. Talking about bringing web3.0 to web2.0? Can’t beat Mask Network’s speed.

Following the success story with Loopring, Mask’s next target is to bring Mirror Protocol’s synthetic stock trading to Twitter. We will likely see more assets on Twitter through Mask Network. After all, who doesn’t want access to millions of enthusiastic CT traders during a bull market? 

2. Miner’s Hashrate + DeFi race

This isn’t Poolin’s first DeFi gig. The mining pool, ranked the world’s second-largest, has been deep into DeFi farming since 2020 summer. It has used DeFi infrastructure as a tool to generate alpha for its asset management business. Now, they are experimenting something bolder. 

A new project, rightfully named Mars, is Poolin’s latest DeFi play. How does it work? 

1. purchase Poolin’s hashrate token pBTC35A

2. stake it in Mars’ liquidity pools or add liquidity to Uniswap pools

3. tadaaaa, you are harvesting both wBTC and Mars governance token. 

Standardizing hashrate isn’t new, but combining it with liquidity mining is innovative. However, Poolin isn’t the only one eyeing the Mining + DeFi combo. The same week, a similar hashrate token BTCST was launched on Binance Smart Chain backed by Power360. Although both tokens represent Proof-of-Work, there are significant differences. 

1. Mars is Ethereum-based and connects directly to other DeFi protocols such as Uniswap 

2. Mars rewards farmers wBTC, which is crypto’s hard currency 

3. But hey, BTCST has access to millions of Binance customers 

There’s no winner in the tokenized hasrhate race yet. And if BTC continues to perform, it could be a win-win-win for all. 

3. Huobi’s HECO Chain

It feels like September all over again when Binance tried to play DeFi catch-up game and copied Ethereum food tokens on its own Binance Smart Chain. Now that three months have passed, it’s Huobi’s turn to do exactly the same: launch its own blockchain and copy something popular from Ethereum. It’s the same playbook and guess what, it works every time. 

It works because Chinese retails are in need of easy, quick, and familiar speculative assets. As major crypto gets more expensive and Ethereum DeFi continues to demand too much brainpower, Chinese retails are left with little choice other than farming DeFi on familiar exchanges. They are low hanging fruit that generates yields. 

HECO also makes sense to Huobi as it continues to cultivate its H-series assets. Plus, if your biggest competitor launched a protocol that works, you should at least consider doing the same, if not do it better. 

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Affirm’s China Equivalent: 

Affirm, a buy-now-pay-later Fintech unicorn, debuted on Nasdaq and doubled its price on the first day. What’s the Chinese equivalent of Affirm? It turns out to be no one other than the troubled Ant Financial. 

One of Ant’s signature product is “Huabei” which means “Just Spend.”  Launched in 2014, Huabei offers credit to shoppers on Alibaba's e-commerce platforms. It means that users can buy-everything-and-pay-later. That’s how Huabei became more like a credit card. At the end of 2018, Huabei posted a net profit of $57 million. 

This was good for a while, but many have voiced concerns as younger generations enjoy the fun of buy-everything but struggle to pay-later. Banks also voiced concern as, well, Ant took away their market share. On top, Jack Ma, Ant Financial’s founder, did not hesitate to call out Chinese banks having “pawnshop mentality.” As a result, Ant’s grand IPO was halted. 

Maybe, just like buy-now-pay-later, one should IPO-now-talk-later. 

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Do you know? 

佛系 which means “buddhistic style” was originally used to express a calm attitude toward difficult or disappointing situations. In recent years, the term took a broader meaning and is used to describe a let-things-flow lifestyle. In crypto, many are using 佛系 to describe people who don’t panic-buy, nor panic sell. Just #hodl