May 30, 2026

Capitalizations Index – B ∞/21M

The White Elephant in the Room – EOS Investors Shell Out $700m for Purposeless Token

One of the main snippets of advice given to inexperienced crypto traders is to try and look for altcoins that have a purpose or technology that can be applied in real-world situations. Many of them do just that including Ethereum, NEO, Substratum, OmiseGO, Power Ledger, Factom, Iota and TenX to name a few. Then there are those that are just currencies such as bitcoin and Litecoin which can also be outstanding investment opportunities as we have seen in recent months.


What is a mystery is the amount of investment that has gone into cryptos that do not really offer anything aside from a blockchain. According to an article on Wall Street Journal investors have already spent $700 million on a tech startup offering a digital token which they themselves state has no purpose.

FOMO Flashes

The company, Block.one, raised the funds during the ICO which has come at a time of mass crypto mania and big doses of FOMO (fear of missing out). The report went on to claim that the Cayman Islands-registered company develops software via an open source website; it has created a blockchain platform that does not really offer anything beyond the thousands that already exist in the crypto sphere.

The website offers a pretty standard ‘we are a scalable decentralized app platform’ statement with a basic white paper and a few team photos. They have been auctioning 2 million tokens every day to raise funds for the ICO. The EOS core code is posted publically and the company released a new version of it last week causing a now commonly seen spike in price that usually follows altcoin news.

Fomo flashes

Toothless Token

Once the platform is released the EOS tokens that have no real relationship to it will serve no purpose. Block.one only intends to write the base code and let third-party developers do the rest.  The WSJ states that a purchase agreement which investors must sign states the tokens “do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features.” In this way, the token seems like the proverbial “white elephant” – expensive to own but serving no purpose.

The current buying frenzy just shows that people are still willing to invest in concepts that are being built for a technological market that doesn’t exist yet. With a market capacity of $5.1 billion EOS is one of the top altcoins of the moment, sitting at 14th place in the crypto cap charts. It has jumped over 450% this month from $1.97 to an all-time high today of $11.11, market corrections have seen the price fall back a little but it is clearly evident that traders are still going crypto nuts.

Is EOS just another useless “white elephant” of a token or will it eventually have some purpose? Would you invest in EOS? Let us know in the comments below.


Images courtesy of AdobeStock, Wikimedia Commons

The post The White Elephant in the Room – EOS Investors Shell Out $700m for Purposeless Token appeared first on Bitcoinist.com.

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China's Interest and Investment in Ethereum's Blockchain Expands

China's Interest and Investment in Ethereum's Blockchain Expands

When we first heard Vitalik Buterin was learning Chinese, it was a clue to his ambitions in China. Less than two years later, the platform he co-founded is now a growing force in the Middle Kingdom. Since he joined the ChinaLedger Alliance (May 2016) and announced the expansion of BlockApps, an Ethereum building-blocks platform, in China (September 2016), there has been a movement in cities and among companies in big industries all throughout China. This is in some part due to the efforts of Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, which has made it their mission in China to bring Ethereum to the mainstream, and also in part to the savvy and persistent efforts of Buterin himself.

At a recent Ethereum meetup in Hong Kong, Buterin said that “Wanxiang Blockchain Labs are making good inroads into China.” Headquartered in Hangzhou, Wanxiang has led the Ethereum charge in China for more than a year. Having partnered with Ethereum early on for the Global Blockchain Summit following Devcon2 in Shanghai in July of 2016, Wanxiang is now China’s top funder of promising blockchain projects.

With its BlockGrantX sponsorship program, it has allocated funds to Ethereum startups including iEx.ec (for fully distributed cloud computing), Proof-of-Identity (for KYC, wallets, multisig, voting, authentication and reputation systems), Golem (P2P computation), Casper (a proof-of-stake consensus protocol), the Raiden Network (an Ethereum off-chain state network) and Micro Oracles (blockchain identity verification). And this month, Wanxiang launched its WanCloud platform for Chinese developers, giving them access to tools for building applications on open-source blockchains.

Since the recent Global Blockchain Financial Summit in Hangzhou, China’s rapid technological developments on the Ethereum platform has been garnering attention. One blog post in particular, from ConsenSys’s Head of Global Business Development Andrew Keys, gave some insight into the rapid rate of Chinese adoption. Highlights of the post, titled “Ethereum Growing Exponentially in China,” include:

  • The creation of an Ethereum Laboratory at Peking University, to work on applications for improving supply chain management and energy markets

  • The Royal Chinese Mint experimenting with a digital RMB on the Ethereum blockchain

  • Chinese companies such as Baidu, Ctrip, JD.com and Meituan utilizing Ethereum technology for aggregated payments services

  • Establishment of the Jiangsu Huaxin BIockchain Research Institute (JBI) in Nanjing, which Keys writes “will be a powerhouse in the Ethereum ecosystem and will become a beachhead for corporations outside of China.”

  • Experimenting with Ethereum technology by Ant Financial, Alibaba’s $60 billion financial arm, to improve their global payment platforms

In Hong Kong, there has also been a surge of new interest in Ethereum. Jehan Chu is the founder of the Ethereum meetup there and a partner at Jen Advisors, a Hong Kong–based early-stage blockchain VC firm. Though the technology is still very young, Chu has seen a huge uptick in activity.

“Ethereum in Southern China has been on a rampage of growth,” Chu told bitcoin Magazine, “with the local HK meetup growing by 50 percent to nearly 800 members in the last six months, and ether trade skyrocketing. Banks, corporates and even casual investors have all heard about Ethereum’s white-hot growth and mounting challenge to bitcoin dominance. More importantly, Ethereum startups worldwide from Status.im and Ox to Golem and MakerDao have made HK’s environment of high-level industry professionals a can’t-miss stop on their Asia business development and capital raising tours.”

Recently the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), connecting Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, academics and technology vendors with Ethereum, announced its expansion into China with a new office in Hangzhou.

At the Global Blockchain Financial Summit in Hangzhou, EEA China said that its main objectives are to “explore and develop new standards and technologies using blockchains, so that Chinese enterprises can more easily meet domestic market needs.” Founding members of the EEA include JP Morgan, Banco Santander, CME Group, Microsoft, Intel, Accenture and blockchain startup ConsenSys.

Over the past week, the price of ether has surged from $85 on May 17 to a high of around $211 on Coinbase on May 25. While many credit this rise to the announcements of the EEA, it is also notable that ETH trading was added to some of China’s digital asset exchanges. On May 14 CHBTC.com added an ETH/CNY trading pair, and on May 16 Yuanbao.com added ETH trading to its platform. It has also been confirmed that China’s top bitcoin exchange OKCoin will soon add ETH trading.

The post China's Interest and Investment in Ethereum's Blockchain Expands appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.