The CoinGeek Pulse Episode 57: China tech sector crackdown continues, Ethereum congestion forces King Tiger Casino shutdown, 2GB block mined on BSV

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As part of its goal to become the world’s “tech superpower,” China’s central government is intensifying the crackdown on technology sectors.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council recently issued the “Implementation Outline for the Construction of a Government under the Rule of Law (2021-2025),” a five-year plan that aims to provide a comprehensive governing and support guide to advancing the modernization of national government systems and its capabilities under the rule of law. This includes regulating and bringing enforcement action against the industries.

Early this year, China released draft rules to cater its goal to regulate big technologies in the country. The rules touch on various areas such as anti-trust and data protection. Big tech companies have grown not only in China but also globally without solid regulatory restrictions from the government.

Authorities said the digital currency sector, among others, should expect tighter regulations in the years ahead. Recently, China filed a civil suit against Tencent over popular messaging app WeChat over its alleged non-compliance with laws protecting minors. In April, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group was fined $2.8B for breaking the country’s anti-monopoly law.

Despite this crackdown, Chinese companies continue to develop blockchain-related products and services. Alibaba has just released a new online market for digital assets traded over a blockchain backed by the Sichuan provincial government. The new feature on Alibaba’s online auctioning platform will now include non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Its ‘Blockchain Digital Copyright and Asset Trade’ service allows artists and game developers to sell the rights to their content via blockchain. Alibaba

Meanwhile, Chinese smartphone company Honor has released the first Snapdragon-powered handset to support the digital yuan, China’s central bank-backed digital currency. This serves as a milestone move for the People’s Bank of China to advance their goal in developing hardware for the digital currency. Honor’s Magic 3 handset will support a digital yuan hardware wallet, and is built on Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon chip, the 888.

In other news, Ethereum’s network congestion has forced a blockchain online casino to shut down. FunFair Technologies’ blockchain casino app, King Tiger Casino, is shutting down temporarily after Ethereum-based Stoner Cats NFT project caused gas fees to skyrocket. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of transactions failed.

Early this month, Ethereum London hard fork was activated to alter the way transaction fees are calculated in the hope of making the token less volatile and cheaper. The recent upgrade will burn Ethereum tokens with every transaction and will make Ethereum deflationary. However, increase in gas fees for users has been observed since.

Many companies looking into blockchain tend to look into Ethereum and its promise to scale. However, many developers and companies such as Fun Fair have learned the hard way that running applications at scale on Ethereum isn’t possible anytime soon.

This is in stark contrast to where the BSV blockchain is today. Early this week, the BSV network smashed its previous largest block world record with block 700606, which came in at 2GB. This is the largest block ever mined on a public blockchain. Transactions per second on BSV are massively high (+5k TPS) compared to the sluggish Ethereum protocol which clocks in at around only 60 TPS.

Another great story that came out of this is, the miner that mined this block earned 10 BSV, more than the 6.25 BSV block reward subsidy given to miners. This proves that there is a thriving economic model in Bitcoin mining driven by high transaction volumes, a large data capacity network and cheap fees.

This is also why there are more developers building on BSV. In fact, Bitcoin Association announced this week the six semifinalists in the 4th Bitcoin SV Hackathon.

The six semi-final entries are: Alien Wallet, an SPV wallet with its own pay-to-order hash function; Bitcoin Phone, an app for broadcasting voice data over the Bitcoin network that leverages the non-finality of nSequence to enable close to real-time data streaming; BitCommit, an application for trustless fitness competitions using micropayments and smart contracts; CATN8, a micropayment-enabled online video platform with a full peer-to-peer SPV wallet implementation; TimeKet, an SPV wallet combined with a reservation and payment validation system; and TKS Pnt, a point tokenization system for use by merchants and their customers.

Three finalists for the 4th Bitcoin SV Hackathon will be announced on August 24. They will present their projects to an elite judges’ panel at the upcoming CoinGeek Conference in New York. Register here to join the eighth CoinGeek Conference, taking place at The Sheraton, Times Square in New York City on October 5-7.