China really isn’t messing around when it comes to blockchain.
CoinDesk reports that blockchain startup Conflux has just bagged some serious backing from the Shanghai government:
A 10,000-square-foot working site, a sizable fund and an opening ceremony attended by city officials. That’s when you know the Chinese government has your back.
The Shanghai government has agreed to open a research institute with blockchain startup Conflux as early as the end of this December, while considering an incubation center that could be set up in June 2020, Fan Long, co-founder of Conflux, told CoinDesk.
They didn’t reveal the exact amount of the “sizable fund” but Long admitted to CoinDesk that it’ll be in the millions of dollars.
Conflux was founded in 2018 by Long, a University of Toronto assistant professor, David Chow, an informatics Olympiad gold medalist, and YuanJie Zhang, a former Wall Streeter. It’s team also includes Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, the Turing Award-winning computer scientist.
The company has raised $35 million from several big names, including Sequoia China and the Huobi Group.
Details about the firm’s research institute are still a bit slim, but the proposed incubation center “aims to invite developers and entrepreneurs to build decentralized applications (dapps) on the public permissionless blockchain developed by the firm.” It’ll use a public blockchain so that “anyone can participate.”
Another of its mandates would be to build dapps for the Shanghai government, with Christian Oertel, Conflux’s global marketing manager, saying that they “can have dapps to help the government track funds and documents to address some of the challenges it is facing in the process.”
Photo: gags9999