Welcome to The Daily Forkast, May 12th, 2021.
I'm Angie Lau.
Let's get you up to speed — from Asia to the world.
The meme coin craze takes China by storm.
#SHIB — short for Shiba Inu
has become a trending topic in Weibo,
China's Twitter-like microblog platform.
Get this, nearly 180 million people read the topic
and there have been seven and a half thousand discussions
on #SHIB since last Friday.
All that talk has turned into action in markets.
Gate.io exchange tells us at Forkast.News that they are seeing
upwards of half a billion dollars of daily trading volume on the coin.
I think it was only a matter of time until we saw a Doge killer project,
and that's exactly what Shiba Inu is.
We've seen so much enthusiasm.
I do have to say China in particular cannot get enough of Shiba.
Would-be investors took to social media, however,
to vent frustrations that all of the interest in Shib
had caused a backlog in exchange registrations as
know your customer or KYC requirements
for new accounts outpace processing capacity.
Toya Zhang, the COO of AAX Exchange, says
they're not backlogged,
but they are seeing a whole new group of
crypto investors signing up,
starting when they listed Dogecoin at the end of April.
We also see this new registered users on our platform
are actually newbie users from the behavior
we monitor that they are actually holding cash
trying to get into this market.
Meanwhile, new coins continue to appear.
Many based on the same Shiba Inu dog
or on Elon Musk himself,
hoping to become the latest meme to catch on.
So how is the original coin Bitcoin holding up?
Not bad, up just 2.5% at the end of Asia, trading hours today.
Meanwhile, Ethereum run hits another all-time high.
And while some aggregators have not added Dfinity's
Internet computer or ICP,
it's ranked eight, according to CoinMarketCap data.
A tax on crypto trading
— according to multiple reports that's the plan
under consideration in Indonesia.
Southeast Asia's biggest economy needs to replenish
state funds after taking a big hit from the Covid-19 pandemic.
A crypto tax could be one way of helping that effort.
The country has seen a sharp increase in
the number of local crypto investors.
Believe it or not, there are more crypto investors
than those in traditional equities right now
in Indonesia.
It is a growing trend we are seeing
across the region.
And finally, who doesn't like a little escape from reality?
3D Avatar app Zepeto from Naver
— one of Korea's largest tech conglomerates
behind the Line messaging app
— is partnering with blockchain-based gaming
virtual world The Sandbox to launch NFTs.
Zepeto is one of Asia's largest virtual worlds
with over 200 million users.
That's more than the population of South Korea.
Luxury brands like Gucci and popular K-pop girl group Black Pink
Black Pink are already on Zepeto.
The collaboration will see Zepeto NFT wearables
like sneakers and game equipment in The Sandbox metaverse
and Parallel Sandbox world in Zepeto.
It will take time, but that next generation of gamers
who are getting used to play to earn,
they will not know what free-to-play has been before
and they will just take it.
It's now normal to be able to be my own bank,
to be able to actually sell my digital goods.
It's like the one I made,
the one I earn by playing.
It's no longer virtual — it is the new reality.
And that's The Daily Forkast.
I'm Angie Lau.
Until next time.