Our weekly news roundup from East Asia selects the most important developments in the industry.
Korean Web3 company raises $140 million
Korean NFT (Nonfungible Token) developer Line Next received an investment of $140 million on December 13 from a consortium led by Crescendo Equity Partners, a private equity fund backed by Peter Thiel. Secured. This is the largest blockchain series funding round in Asia this year.
The company’s NFT platform, called “DOSI”, will be integrated with the Japanese NFT marketplace Line NFT and debut in January 2024.
“Through this investment, Line Next plans to introduce new services to further accelerate the popularization of Web3. “This includes using AI technology to launch a social app that allows users to communicate based on the characters they create, and launching a new web 3 game that anyone can enjoy using the Brown & Friends characters.”
Line Next plans to create a new service on the public blockchain Pinskia with Line and Crescendo participating in the Pinskia Foundation as governance members. The company claims to have achieved over 470,000 cumulative transactions through various decentralized applications operating under the DOSI brand. Line, a popular messaging app, has over 5 million users.
China’s artificial intelligence market exceeds $1.42 trillion this year
The state-run China Electronic and Information Industry Development Academy (CEIIDA) said on December 14 that China’s AI market size will reach 10 trillion yuan ($1.42 trillion) this year, driven by the use of generative AI in manufacturing, retail and information technology. estimated. , and health care. And he said the industry is just getting started.
“By 2035, generative artificial intelligence is expected to contribute nearly 90 trillion yuan of economic value to the world, of which our country will account for more than 40%, exceeding 30 trillion yuan.”
According to official statistics, there are more than 1,800 AI companies in Beijing alone. Advances in AI in China have enabled companies to bypass the requirement to develop their own in-house generated AI models and directly leverage the power of AI computing through cloud technology. CEIIDA researchers estimate that 35% of the country’s digital computing tasks will be handled by AI by 2025. Meanwhile, the city of Beijing has begun issuing ‘vouchers’ linked to government-related generated AI software. AI Voucher promises to compute and deliver data for tasks such as medical inquiries within “one millisecond” of startup.
Earlier this year, on June 5, Chinese AI startup Guangnian Zhiwai (“Lightyears Away”) achieved unicorn status less than 100 days after its founding. The round was led by a prominent Chinese venture capital firm along with Chinese internet giant Tencent. According to media reports, Lightyears Away aims to become China’s OpenAI, mirroring its success in the United States. The company had no product to market at the time of the price increase and then began hiring only technical staff.
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Huobi co-founder’s new venture identity
Sinohope Technology (also known as New Huo Tech) is a cryptocurrency exchange and custodian founded by Huobi Global co-founder Leon Li. On December 13, the company said it expected a loss of HK$280 million ($35.86 million) in the first nine months of 2023, up from HK$200 million ($25.61 million) in the same period last year. Some of the losses included HK$86 million ($11 million) in corporate deposits stuck at bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
When FTX collapsed last November, Leon extended a $14 million personal line of credit to provide relief to Sinhope customers affected by FTX’s collapse. Sinohope said a full financial report on the company’s operations for the first nine months of 2023 would be published this month.
On December 11, X-Spot Global, another company owned by Leon Li, won an injunction against Huobi Global to stop using the Chinese equivalent “Huobi” trademark in Hong Kong.
According to court documents, the Huobi trademark was registered in Hong Kong in 2019. In September 2022, Huobi Global was sold by co-founders Leon Li and Du Jun to About Capital Management, an entity linked to Chinese blockchain celebrity Justin Sun. However, the rights to the Chinese Huobi trademark were fully transferred to Leon Li’s X-Spot Global prior to the acquisition, making that company the trademark owner. Huobi later rebranded to HTX in September this year.
OKX DEX exploited for $2.7 million
Cryptocurrency exchange OKX’s decentralized exchange (DEX) was reported to have suffered a $2.7 million hack on December 13 after the private keys of proxy manager owners were reportedly leaked. In a statement, OKX developers said: said This was “resulting from the theft of administrative rights of an abandoned OKX DEX market maker contract that is no longer in use.” Developers estimate the loss to be lower than reported by the blockchain analytics firm, at $370,000 across 18 addresses.
“Judicial proceedings will be initiated to recover the relevant losses. The platform will conduct security self-checks and restructure all relevant abandoned contracts to prevent such incidents from occurring again in the future. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused.”
BitGet spot trading volume increases by 82% amid thaw in the cryptocurrency market
Cryptocurrency BitGet’s spot trading volume rose 82% in November as part of a broader industry recovery. In its monthly report, the exchange revealed that its protection fund, which consists of 6,500 Bitcoin (BTC) and 120 million Tether (USDT), has seen a surge in capital appreciation value of $90 million compared to when the fund was launched on December 22, 2022. The exchange also registered 5,000 new traders last month.
“Also, the first week of December saw an increase in demand for copy trading in the spot market (launching in January 2023) compared to the first week of November, with a 23% increase in the number of users engaging in copy trading. “We saw a 17% increase in users compared to the entire December of the previous year.”
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Jiyuan Line
Zhiyuan Sun is a journalist at Cointelegraph specializing in technology news. He has years of experience writing for major financial outlets such as The Motley Fool, Nasdaq.com, and Seeking Alpha.