In the past day, AntShare, a Chinese implementation of a blockchain similar to Ethereum, skyrocketed in price.

Here is what we know about AntShare (clipped and edited from this Reddit post):

1. AntShares was developed by a company called ONCHAIN, based in Shanghai. Da Hongfei is the CEO of ONCHAIN as well as the creator of AntShares.

Vitalik (Creator of Ethereum) sitting next to Da Hongfei (Creator of AntShares)

2. AntShares has some high profile partners listed on its site, including WINGS, Alibaba, and Microsoft

WINGS combines the ideas of crowdfunding with swarm intelligence decision-making through decentralized forecast markets into a project funding and governance platform easily accessible to anyone with a smart phone.

Alibaba is China’s — and by some measures, the world’s — biggest online commerce company. Its three main sites — Taobao, Tmall and Alibaba.com — have hundreds of millions of users, and host millions of merchants and businesses. Alibaba handles more business than any other e-commerce company. Source

3. The collaboration with Wings is an R&D partnership.

“The strategic cooperation enables European and North American DAO projects to tap into the Chinese cryptocurrency community, and Chinese start-ups to do the same with European and North American communities. Further, the two organizations agree to coordinate resources on mutual business opportunities, and promote joint hackathons to drive ecosystem innovation.”

4. The collaboration with Microsoft relates to Microsoft Azure, specifically a legal blockchain project of some kind.

Any collaboration with Microsoft is huge.

5. The Alibaba collaboration entails a partnership between ONCHAIN and Ali Cloud working on “proof-of-existence for a blockchain-powered email evidence repository as a bottom-layer framework designed for enterprise-level use.

Enterprise level application development on AntShare is nothing but good news for the platform.

6. AntShares is also partnered with Bancor.

Not sure how I feel about this. Bancor has received a lot of flak from experts in the industry, and I am highly skeptical of this particular organization.

7. Despite the similarities in name and logo, AntShares is not connected or affiliated with Ant Financial, Alibaba’s fintech spinoff. Ant Financial has created at least one blockchain of its own.

8. Representatives from AntShares have attended at least one government-sponsored industry conference on blockchain. It also appears AntShares held a blockchain competition in collaboration with a committee of the Shanghai municipal government.

Government support is pretty much required for any startup enterprise based in China, so this could be really good news. However, since no formal endorsement has been made this could mean absolutely nothing.

What is causing the current rise in value of AntShare?

A lot of what is driving the current meteoric rise in valuation can be found in a few key points that investors/traders are just now beginning to realize:

AntShares is very comparable to Ethereum, which has already experienced its own spectacular gain in value over the past 6 months. AntShares has (according to its own site) implemented sharding and concurrency to solve its scalability issues, something Ethereum is currently still working on. AntShares is holding a blockchain conference/seminar this Thursday, June 22, and details surrounding this event has emerged revealing that Microsoft will be speaking at the event, in addition to an expected rebranding of AntShares itself. AntShares is currently only available on 5 exchanges, with only ONE exchange available for buying/selling of AntShares (ANS) for Bitcoin. This bottlenecks the entire Western market through one exchange. Due to lackluster marketing and a deep language barrier (most documentation on AntShares was in Chinese), the Western markets are only just now learning about the potential of AntShares, and many are seeing a second chance at their very own Ethereum-like profit gains. AntShares has been in development since 2014, and provides the ability to implement smart contracts/DAPPs in many more languages than Ethereum currently supports. Many Westerners are only just now learning about China and its current fascination with digital cash. The rise of QR codes and digital monetary transactions has been well documented, and fits in neatly with AntShares vision.

This new information being unveiled to the Western market, combined with an exchange bottleneck, has led to one of the biggest cryptocurrency upswing in a single day that we have ever seen.

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