Just like a huge vortex, many incredible resources are sucked into the blockchain area, not related to the age, the experience and the capital. Accompanied with the process of resources involving, new resources and features are also being derived.
Massive resources are pouring into the blockchain market.
（1）Getting a job in Blockchain is the right move in 2018 for a higher income.
Blockchain developers in China are in high demand, with many on salaries amounting to as much as ￥25,000 a month, a quickly rising percentage of 14% to 108%. Tecent, Xiaomi, Xunlei and Meitu are even offering a higher salary above ￥40,000. Incredibly, the position in Suning and Keda Group is up to 100,000 per month.The eyes of the talents are caught by these alluring salaries.
Compared with red-hot job category in AI, the blcokchain related jobs are even equal in the salary.
Official figures show that the average salary of Chinese fresh graduates in 2017 is ￥4,300 , while it for the master graduates is ￥5,900.Compared with the huge wages obtained in the blockchain industry, these average salaries (a double value in 2010) sounds unattractive any more. The monthly salary a new graduate obtained can reach to ￥10,000~￥30,000， which is 2~3 times of the average level.
A supply-demand disequilibrium is in the back of the talent market in blockchain. In November 2017, job demand in the blockchain field broke out, with 9.7-fold increasement by the same date in last year. However, there are not more than 3,000 talents who actually understand the development of blockchain technology in China.
Furthermore，training institutes are on the front line with the contradition for the professional talent. During the past month( February 15th- March13th), the Baidu search engine index of “Blockchain training institute” has climbed from 79 to 639, a rising rate of 700.9%.
a. Blockchain training courses
Chinese tech giants are boosting the training courses. Tencent and Netease have launched blockchain public courses;Baidu has joined with Huobi (a famous blockchain exchange) to open the course of “100 questions of Blockchain “. Some traditional computer training centers in China are in the rush to launch the programming courses, including CNDC, Tedu, itheima, 51CTO etc. The cost of these courses varies from ￥1 to several thousands, and the most expensive course is reaching to ￥88,000.
b.The traditional university courses
Foreign universities move faster in the blockchain talent training. MIT, Stanford University, Preston University, University of California, Cornell University and Duke University are all taking actions into this area from 2014. In China, Tsinghua University is the only university that has its own blockchain course. Zhejiang University is palning to opening its postgraduate course.
（2）The blockchain technology breaks the record of creating millionaires.
The ability is a rock to shock for blockchain to absorb fortune and create riches. In some way, it bridges the wealth gap. Bitcoin traded sharply higher, and the price was up 50~100 times at $7,403 last year, with the peak record of $19,299. Ordinary people benefited from these precipitate wealth overnight.
At one point, a Ripple co-founder,Chris Larsen,was worth more than $59 billion, briefly vaulting ahead of Facebook (FB) chief Mark Zuckerberg as one of the world’s richest people in 2018 February.
（3）The ignored beneficiary : the industrial chain instructor such as mining and lawyers
Under the background of blockchain waves, supplement industries develop.
a. Cryptocurrency mining
One aspect of the blockchain space that has garnered a lot of attention is the concept of ‘Bitcoin Mining’ or ‘Cryptocurrency mining’. A study found that mining Bitcoin uses more energy than 159 respective countries, suggesting cryptocurrency mining energy use has become too high.
The average electricity cost to product per bitcoin is $7295, what the price doesn‘t include the equipments and other human costs. The electricity cost in Oceania is the most expensive,at a price of $12203, while it in Africa is the cheapest ($4626).
China produces the most Bitcoin in the world using Bitcoin mining for its low prices of electricity. However, China’s government is planning to shut down Bitcoin miners in its latest crackdown on the cryptocurrency and making an orderly exit from the industry.
Bitcoin mining, which currently costs around $8,000, is close to being unprofitable as the price of the virtual currency continues to decline. Besides, the energy costs are astonishing. However, it doesn’t stop. The computers generate intense heat and must be continuously cooled. To reduce the cooling cost, miners chose some cold place in the world. Bitfury Group, a major player in the mining industry, announced that it would be expanding its operations into Norway, with the “delighted” welcome from the government officials.
The sudden increase in cryptocurrency mining has pushed the price of graphics cards through the roof. Popular favorites of cryptocurrency miners such as Nvidia’s GTX 1060 and 1070 graphics cards, as well as AMD’s RX 570 and 580 GPUs, have all doubled if not tripled in price.
The graphics cards market is the only growing market in the GPU market.More than 3 million cards are sold to cryptocurrency miners in 2017,causing a GPU shortage. AMD, a leading manufacturer in graphics cards, expanded its market share to 14.4%.
b.The justice system
Numbers of the instructors in the blockchain industrial are booming and benefiting from the blockchain heat. Take the justice systems as an example. The justice system takes the advantages of technology change.
ICO(always referring to as initial coin offering) is a high risk funding activity, as a result of entrepreneurs may doubtlessly be sued if their token misplaced cash.The “winners” within the booming observe of initial coin offering will be the lawyers from the authorized group.
ICOs are even riskier than you think. Tokendata, one of the more comprehensive ICO trackers, lists 902 crowdsales which took place last year. 46% of last year’s ICOs have already failed,142 of which failed at the funding stage and a further 276 of which have since failed, either due to taking the money and running, or slowly fading into obscurity.
（4）The crowds of selfmedia are bringing with the downside.
The once-hot blockchain market drives the selfmedia to flock. More than 2,00 self media are participating in the blockchain fever, which is expected to be more than 1000 in 2018. More than 50 self media appeared in the January.
Compared with the emerging technology of AI,5G and 3D printing, it’s rare that lots of media resources are flowing into these specific area. What makes it more amazing is that it squeezes the original space of other selfmedia.After the heat of blockchain, the update frequency of AI related WeChat official accounts are decreasing suddenly. Only about 50 accounts updated their contents in the past month.
These blockchain-related media are attractive to investors, some of whom have received tremendous angle fundings, such as Jinse Finance, Future Finance, Ear Finance and so on.
The reward is with the risk.Without the force of supervise, some of the self media ignore the rules and try to sale some rubbish coins to the investor by misinformation. The month avenue of a hot selfmedia accounts can reach to ￥20,000,000 per month. The smaller accounts also can make a money of more than ￥100,000 per month.
(5)The sweeping of supporting industry：a massive network of blockchain applications
The blockchain technology has a strong vitality to break the former rules and establish its own supporting industry. Since the publication of A peer-to-peer electronic cash system in 2008，the blockchain ecosystem has flooded with smart startups. The market map of blockchain covers the transaction & payment services, cryptocurrency exchanges & trading, identity, authentication & security, enterprise blockchain solutions, social, games & gambling and the ecosystem building. Top blockchain startups are disturbing the non-financial markets.
(6)Funding resource:projects and capitals are chasing after each other , while the real and practical projects are rare.
The blockchain technology is reaching fever pitch in recent year, which leads to a new-rich of blockchain projects. GitHub, the popular open-source code repository and collaboration platform, draw the state of the blockchain development scene. There are an estimated 86,000 blockchain-based repositories on GitHub. Organizations are taking part in the race of blockchain projects. The registration of organizations grows fast at a 20% compound annual growth rate.
The total Chinese(930) and American(2063) blockchain related apps have summed to 2993 by March in 2018.
On average, projects have a life span on just one year, while most flame out within the first six months.
Facing the challenge of hot market, the capital resources are still boiling.
41% of the projects got fund are related to the blockchain technology in 2018Q1, which 11 of 12 blockchain startups are granted for the funds. The pass rate ups to 92%, which much higher than the traditional internet projects(a pass rate of 12.5%).Just in the last week, 9 blockchain startups won a total funding of ￥1.34 billion.
Owning to the mist of political regulation, blockchain is argued by different groups, which do not expel the adventurers from the piece of cake. There were 15 times more active VC investors focusing on blockchain in 2016 than there were in 2012. The numbers is expected to hit 120 by the end of 2017.After dropping steeply in 2016, VCs are showing renewed interested in the sector.
The famous incubator VCs are on the list of most active blockchain VCs. The incubators are stepping into this sectors earlier than expected, including 500 startups, Plug and Play(Plug and Play Ventures) , A16z(Andreessen Horowitz).
The blockchain technology has a long term development potential.
（1）The blockchain is the only technology which has the power to develop its supporting facilities in a quickly speed besides Internet.
Take the hotest community of 3 o’clock as an example. More than 200 branches have been established within two weeks , accompanied with more than 1,000 fake communities.The audiences in the coverage area are more than 80,000, who are mainly a KOL in their real life.
The blockchain shows a unprecedented spread power of the new technology. At the same time, the existing use cases for blockchain technology are expected to come to life ,while completely new use cases are emerging and an increased number of joint product launches. The blockchain has evolved its integrated ecosystem, including the miner industry, the security insurance industry, exchangers and enterprise solutions. According to incomplete statistics, at present, there are more than 200 selfmedia with the name of chain. Some of the big traditional media are putting their hands too, where is a self media bloom.
（2）Blockchain is a rapid, crazy and organized consensus. It’s a time for the new establishment of rules, where China can stand on the top place.
As a consensus process for new transaction, blockchain is well-organised, breaking up the old rules and establishing the new one based on the high-trust. At $6.3 billion, ICO funding in the first quarter is now 118 percent of the total for 2017.Still, the data perhaps tells a more nuanced story of growth.The first quarter saw 59 percent as many ICOs as in all of 2017 receive capital.
Although the ICO market is prosperous, the risk of ICO should not be ignored.The Russian Association of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain alleged that half of the $300 miilion raised by Russian ICOs in 2017 went to pyramid schemes.
a.Chinese Capital
New investor body is shaped as the result of the new blood. 4 of Top 10 active venture investors are new emerging blockchain capital. What makes this situation especial is that Chinese capital—Fenbushi Capital（分布式资本）—is rarely on the list. On the contrary, the traditional VCs will be more careful.
b. Chinese blockchain patents
China leads blockchain patent applications, processing over 50% blockchain patents in the world. China filed 225 of the blockchain patents last year and 59 in 2016, followed by the US (91 in 2017 and 21 in 2016) and Australia (13 last year and 19 in 2016).
c.Chinese hash power
It’s important to note that most mining pools are in China,where China is,in some way, the most hash-powered country. Chinese pools control over 90% of the network hash rate, all the top 3 mining pools coming from China.
Tech giants and the small startups are on the stage.
（1）Tech giants are testing the water more carefully, leaving a room for the small companies.
The tech giants are accelerating their paces in the test from different levels.
IBM lauched a series of blockchain products to help startups and developers to create their own distributed ledger projects.Different to the public blockchain network that underpins bitcoin, IBM’s technology only allows a certain number of trusted parties to access it. This type of blockchain is known as “permissioned.”
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the secure cloud services platform from Amazon.com that offers computational power, data storage, content delivery, and hosting services, has made a foray into the newly emerging “blockchain-as-a-service” (BaaS) offering.BaaS is a way to rent a blockchain from a blockchain hosting provider, who takes care of getting started and having the required blockchain deployed and configured within minutes,helping to save the developing time.
Panda Green Energy officially delegated Huawei and New Energy Exchange(NEX) to build smart power plant blockchain management system and start the development of Pandacoin. In the future, the Panda 100 project will promote the new ecology of the energy Internet and blockchain, and realize global new energy interconnection through Pandacoin developed by NEX.
The incubator project is based in Beijing and aims to leverage the huge infrastructure of JD.com in China and find some new application areas for blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI).
（2）Startups are shining.
Blockchain is the next big thing in the internet – offering entrepreneurs a golden opportunity to be among the early adopters.
Cryptocurrency finance：Circle Internet Financial、Ripple、BitPay
The main business of start-up companies in this field is to provide services for buying, selling or storing Crypto-currencies without requiring financial intermediaries.
Cryptocurrency exchange services：Coinbase、itBit、Bitstamp
The main business of start-up companies in this field is to provide various cryptocurrency exchange services and their related derivative services.
Security：Filament、ShoCard、Elliptic、Chain、Symbiont、Axoni
Blockchains are hard to modify，which protect the fact authenticity of data, assets, or files. In addition, it also can be used to track individuals, entities, and devices. Despite of its security usage, blockchain-based applications are still vulnerable to cyber attacks.Startups in the security create a security foundation for transactions, data storage, and network communications.
