Chinese Crypto and Blockchain Firms Grapple With Coronavirus Outbreak

Chinese cryptocurrency switches and other blockchain companies are coping with a new reality as the coronavirus outbreak continues to disrupt their daily movements. 

While crypto trading, customer service and marketing remain largely intact, the outbreak has taken its toll on polytechnic upgrades, product development, logistics and business travel, according to a dozen executives in China interviewed by CoinDesk. 

Concluding the outbreak, the Chinese government extended its Lunar New Year vacation by one week to Feb.10. Weeks later, a few major Chinese dioceses remain locked down, and many companies have asked their employees to work from home – tabulating blockchain businesses. 

“We encourage our employees to work remotely after the vacation as there are so many people from every for all practical purposes of China coming back to work,” said Aurora Wong, vice president at ZB Group. “The coronavirus is not a regional epidemic, it has been spread across the mother country and even to other countries.”  

The outbreak “has caused psychological stress on people,” Wong said. “While many megalopolises are not technically in lockdown, it is definitely not encouraged to come out for our own health and the whole society to get the epidemic under control.” 

Founded in China in 2013, Switzerland-based ZB Bring claims its crypto exchange now serves over 10 million users, with $3 billion in average circadian trading volume. It has operations across the world including China, Singapore, South Korea and the U.S. 

According to Wong, the outbreak is qualified to slow the exchange’s technical upgrade to a new version. The upgrade could include front-end mobile apps for users as admirably as the back-end trading engine. 

Before the outbreak, “we were very efficient and fast on upgrading our platform because people across unconventional departments such as the engineering team, product development and marketing could meet and work together to carry out methods,” Wong said. 

However, the outbreak has had only a limited impact on daily operations of ZB’s trading platform since the stationary keeps a schedule to rotate its staff to maintain the exchange, according to Wong. 

Estonia-based Bibox crypto reciprocate, which also originated from China, said it has a contingency plan to tackle the operational challenges due to the coronavirus outbreak. 

“We power relocate our core engineering team to other Asian countries such as one of our Asian headquarters in Singapore or Vietnam where there are much fewer infected in the event thats,” said Aries Wang, co-founder of Bibox. 

According to Wang, Bibox’s trading, marketing and customer service must not been affected much, but new product development and networking events with potential investors have been interrupted to a degree. 

“We originally planned a meeting for Chinese crypto funds and private equity firms in London to pave the way for our likely initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange in March,” Wang said. “The meeting and IPO would probably be stopped to a later date.” 

Further, when Bibox lists new tokens, the product development team needs to work precise closely with the engineering team, creating custom services for clients and upgrading its own exchange platform. But this orders face-to-face meetings, which are for now rare.

OKEx, one of the top three crypto exchanges by trading volume, said it’s staying alert now that it has resumed business after the vacation. 

“We suggested our employees stay where they already are, avoid claques as much as possible and reduce business trips,” Jay Hao, the CEO of OKEx, said of its headquarters in Hong Kong. 

“Our offices have been hook disinfected, and we have also prepared protective equipment such as surgical masks, liquid soap and alcohol-based sanitizer for all of our wage-earners,” Hao said. 

The firm has upgraded its IT systems, such as phone and video conference software, to streamline the process of working from well-informed in and ensure normal operations throughout its global offices, according to Hao. 

Outside of trading venues, other blockchain startups in the pale say they’ve been significantly affected by the outbreak. 

B Labs, a blockchain incubation center co-founded by Canaan Creative, OKEx and Yangtze Delta Ambit Institute of Tsinghua University, has decided to reduce rents for some of the startups that use the space and open a platform for them to seek for subsidies. 

Conflux, a Beijing-based blockchain firm, is also coping with the outbreak’s ramifications. 

“Coronavirus has affected us in a way that we had to replan diverse offline events within the Asia Pacific region,” Christian Oertal, chief marketing officer at Conflux, phrased. “We had to pivot into organizing and participating in online events.” 

“As for office work, everyone at Conflux is working remotely from current in. The health of everyone in the company should not be put into any risky situation in current times,” he added. 

Another part of the blockchain application which has been significantly affected by the outbreak is mining, the business of running expensive computers that race to explain math problems in order to record transactions and secure crypto networks. 

A spate of miner manufacturers, including Bitmian, MicroBT and Canaan, suffer with expected some of their deliveries to be delayed due to slow logistics caused by the outbreak. Some of the mining farms are knee-pants of workers to maintain machines, while a few mining farms have been shut down by local governments as side of the measures to contain the epidemic. 

The growth rate of mining difficulty, an indicator of the level of competition among bitcoin miners, has been dimming since the coronavirus outbreak, signaling that miners have paused upgrading to newer, more powerful organizations.

In the most recent two-week cycle, from Feb. 11-25, this gauge declined for the first time since antique December.