Blockchain

End of Sharing Economy? Home-Cooked Reportedly Closed

Published

1 year ago

June 4, 2020

Cooking-sharing app Home-Cooked has halted operations, the Paper reported Wednesday, showing the downsides of sharing economy in today’s China.

“Our platform is going to close,” Home-Cooked sent out a message to its users. “To get your refunds processed, please submit requests before June 1.”

Home-Cooked was designed to share cooking from private kitchens with people who were craving for home-made food but had no time to cook themselves. Users could order online in advance, and either choose to dine at the cook’s house or order a delivery. Known for its home-cooking style and reasonable prices, Home-Cooked soon rose to popularity soon after its launch in October 2014 attracting millions of users from all over China. During its peak month, millions of deals were made on the app, and each cook completed over 100 orders.

The founder of Home-Cooked, Tang Wanli, was one of the youngest managers at Alibaba. After leaving Alibaba, Tang had been looking for start-up ideas. The then-booming sharing economy gave Tang an idea to share kitchens and “Uber” cooking.

“I’m so sad I didn’t save the cook’s contacts,” a user posted online. “That was the only place I could find mom’s taste.”

Though many users were saddened by the closure of Home-Cooked, some raised an alarm about the food safety on the app. Food providers on the app were mostly private kitchens without food distribution permits, thus the materials and the cooking environment were unstandardized and unsupervised. According to a Home-Cooked worker, registered cooks on the app only needed to provide IDs and health certificates, while food distribution permits were not required. As customers become more and more cautious of food safety, sharing-kitchens may never come back without a robust supervision system.

Source: https://pandaily.com/end-of-sharing-economy-home-cooked-reportedly-closed/

Related Topics:alibaba blockchain China environment

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Blockchain

‘Bitcoin maxis’ like Solana, but is there sound logic to that

Published

1 hour ago

September 28, 2021

Republished by Plato

Recent changes in cryptocurrency market dynamics have fueled the popularity of altcoins like Solana [SOL]. It recently became one of the most trending blockchain platforms around on the back of its surging price.

The cryptocurrency, in fact, had a 1-year ROI of over 4,200%, despite dropping by 34% since its peak in early September. Despite the latest hiccup in value, however, market observers believe the project has managed “winning over a significant number of Bitcoin Maxis or near-maxis.”

Ikigai Funds’ Travis Kling offered this observation on Twitter when he said,

“After talking to a bunch of folks over the last couple months, it’s pretty clear that SOL is successfully winning over a significant number of BTC Maxis or near-maxis, which have previously owned zero ETH or very little ETH.”

While the crypto-space is competitive, the tech-twist to the age-old saying – “competition of your competition is your ally” also holds true. Solana is not competing with Bitcoin. Instead, it is competing with Ethereum’s position in decentralized finance, NFTs, and smart contract offerings. Given the fact that transacting on Ethereum is still a pain for some users, Solana’s cheap and fast transactions provide a better alternative to many.

Solana’s DeFi projects recently crossed $3 billion, despite Ethereum hosting the maximum number of DeFi and NFT projects. While Bitcoin “maxis” are also opting-in for smart contracts, they prefer SOL over ETH, according to Kling.

Why? According to the exec,

“I think maxis look at ETH vs SOL and think –

Well as long as its not going to be all that decentralized, might as well have a smart contract platform that can actually handle enough throughput with cheap enough fees where it can really scale, instead getting choked up like ETH.”

However, not everyone agrees with Kling’s opinions. Many believe the decentralization narrative to be wrongly used by Kling, with another Twitter user @mikemcg0 noting that Ethereum is “more decentralized than BTC.” Anyone can run an Ethereum validator,” he said, “but only a select few oligopolies can mine BTC.”

Even so, Bitcoin mining has spread out even more after the recent China crackdown. Although the process is extensive in terms of effort, time, and money, according to another user, “anyone can” mine BTC “if they have the entrepreneurial mindset.”

Now, the latest outage faced by Solana did raise questions about the level of centralization. However, that has not really discouraged those who want to indulge in DeFi, NFTs, and smart contracts. As Solana forges new contracts with Hacken Foundation and Gate.io, others institutions like Osprey Funds and Grayscale are in a race to include Solana in their respective bouquet of products.

In fact, Osprey Funds has already registered Osprey Solana Trust with the SEC.

‘Ethereum killer’ or not, Solana is en route to gaining more interest from the booming crypto-market. Even turning so-called BTC maxis in the process.

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Source: https://ambcrypto.com/bitcoin-maxis-like-solana-but-is-there-sound-logic-to-that

Blockchain

Europe Now World’s Biggest Crypto Economy: Boasts Over $1T Worth of Transactions

Published

2 hours ago

September 28, 2021

Republished by Plato

Central, Northern, and Western Europe (CNWE) has grown into the world’s largest cryptocurrency economy since July 2020. The region experienced a massive increase in trading activity since then– particularly in the DeFi space.

The European DeFi Boom

Data from Chainalysis shows that CNWE received over $1 trillion in cryptocurrency over the last year alone. This represents 25% of global trading activity. Furthermore, it is responsible for at least 25% of all crypto value received by other regions, including 34% of the value received in North America.

This makes the EU the most concentrated in the world in terms of cryptocurrency trading volume. This is partially due to increases in all forms of trading activity over the past year, coming mostly from institutional investors.

Large institutional transaction value grew from $1.4B in July 2020 to $46.3B in June 2021, coming to take up half of all CNWE trading activity. The most pronounced increases were seen on DeFi protocols, where over 80% of these large institutional transactions were sent in June.

The impact of DeFi is further established when ranking coins in terms of transaction activity in the region. Despite being the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Bitcoin heavily trails Ethereum in transaction volume among large institutional investors. Additionally, DeFi protocols took up a majority share of funds received by cryptocurrency services in CNWE in June 2021.

The Decline in Eastern Asia

CNWE has seen significant absolute increases in its crypto trading volume. However, its new place as the world’s largest trading hub is partly due to a sharp decline in market share held by Eastern Asia– the previous world leader.

In early 2019 the region held over 30% of global transaction volume. This figure has since fallen sharply to about 15% – less than CNWE, North America, and even Central and Southern Asia.

This may be related to China’s continued push to prevent and discourage crypto trading within its borders. China re-announced their ban on crypto trading in the country days ago, and have been moving to prevent all access to exchanges within the country.

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Source: https://cryptopotato.com/europe-now-worlds-biggest-crypto-economy-boasts-over-1t-worth-of-transactions/

Blockchain

Here’s why a multi-CBDC bridge is being tested on Ethereum

Published

2 hours ago

September 28, 2021

Republished by Plato

The race to launch the first CBDC is one the world is following intently. While most have their eyes fixed on China’s digital yuan pilot, a group of countries has come together to take CBDCs a step further.

Phase 3 of Project Inthanon-LionRock saw BIS Innovation Hub Hong Kong Centre, the Digital Currency Institute of the People’s Bank of China, and the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates experiment with a multi-CBDC bridge or an mBridge.

What does this mean?

The mBridge initiative would ideally allow central banks in different countries to issue and redeem their own CBDCs across borders on a common platform – without having to depend on correspondent banks.

Meanwhile, commercial banks would be able to “submit peer-to-peer CBDC push payments.”

The BIS September 2021 report stated,

“If successful, an efficient, low cost, compliant and scalable multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction arrangement can provide a network of direct central bank collaboration, greatly increasing the potential for international trade flows and cross-border business at large.”

The report further clarified,

“The prototype demonstrates a substantial improvement in cross-border transfer speed from multiple days to seconds, as well as the potential to reduce several of the core cost components of correspondent banking.”

Here, it is also interesting to note that the project’s Phase 2 prototype was built on Ethereum. This was because the core layer of the prototype contained the blockchain ledger and smart contracts.

Notes on features

As a multiple CBDC project, regulation and compliance were functional requirements. Central banks would be able to monitor transactions in real-time, set balance limits, control the balance held by their commercial banks, and use data for surveillance.

Scalability was also part of the design to later onboard more participants and jurisdictions.

However, one complication was the wide difference in remittance charges across countries. While the global average was calculated to be 6.38% of the remitted sum, the report observed that even a percentage as low as 1% would be costly for payments in the millions of dollars.

An update from China

Alongside the mBridge project, China has also been steamrolling ahead with its CBDC program.

Changchun Mu, Director-General of the DCI of the People’s Bank of China. confirmed that e-CNY pilots have been taking place in 10 areas.

Mu added,

“Payment methods such as QR code and tap-and- go have been well-supported and innovative services such as dual-offline payment and wearable device payment have been tested for safety and efficiency.”

Meanwhile, Howard Lee, Deputy Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, suggested that an e-HKD could also be in the works.