Antshares, the “first original Chinese public chain,” has seen some serious price spikes in the past couple of days, now sitting at an all-time high of nearly $9 or .004 BTC.
Of course, here on this side of the planet, there hasn’t been a lot of buzz about Antshares. This could be due to the fact that Antshares is not directed at Western users at all. CCN.com figured that, given the spiking price, it would be a good time to give our readers an overview of the Antshares project.
Antshares has the following features that differentiate it from Ethereum and Bitcoin:
People can use it to digitalize assets or shares, and accomplish some financial business through peer-to-peer network such as registration and issuing, make transactions, settlement and payment.
Could Antshares be like the Badu to Bitcoin’s Google? Something native to the region, which already knows how to navigate the regulatory landscape, could certainly see significant gains in China. While Chinese-produced forks of Bitcoin have been done in the past, Antshares is far from a standard Satoshi client.
The spread of a given currency is very much a matter of its social acceptability and so-called network effect. The network effect of Facebook has not fully consumed the world, for instance – in China, they have their own major social networks, like Weibo and Renren, as well as in Russia they have VK. Facebook is not dominant in these areas, but instead, competes for users with natively-built alternatives.
Bitcoin adoption could follow a similar path in certain parts of the world. Borderless currency or not, Bitcoin is certainly much harder to learn about if one is not an Anglophile. As such, projects like Antshares might have a legitimate chance at maintaining their foothold, at least regionally. The same could happen in Russia – rather than mass Bitcoin adoption, they could adopt something homegrown that performs all the same functions. The recent price rise in Antshares could be on the buzz surrounding their upcoming conference, or it could be that newcomers to the cryptocurrency markets are looking globally at other innovative projects which appear untapped.
Certainly, if Antshares becomes more widely used in China, its value could rise many-fold, and we may be witnessing only the beginning of its ascent.
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