Chinese Crypto Firms Help Fight The Coronavirus Outbreak

Many Chinese crypto firms along with the blockchain companies are helping in the fight with the coronavirus outbreak as it continues to disrupt the daily operations as we are reading further in the crypto news today.

While the crypto trading and customer services remain intact, the coronavirus outbreak has taken a toll on technical upgrades, business travel, and logistics according to executives in the Chinese crypto firms. Following the outbreak, the Chinese government extended its Lunar New Year vacation but weeks later a lot of the cities remain locked down and many companies released their workers to get the job done from home, including the blockchain companies. The Vice president at ZB Group Aurora Wong commented:

 “We encourage our employees to work remotely after the vacation as there are so many people from every part of China coming back to work. The coronavirus is not a regional epidemic, it has been spread across the country and even to other countries. The outbreak “has caused psychological stress on people. While many cities 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.”

The ZB group claimed its crypto exchange now serves more than 10 million users with $3 billion in average daily trading volume. The operations are spread across the world including South Korea, China, and Singapore as well as the United States. According to Wong, the outbreak will slow down the technical upgrade of the exchange to a new version which will include a front-end mobile apps for users and back-end trading engine as well.

The outbreak had a limited impact on the daily operations of the platform since the company has a schedule that rotates the staff to maintain the exchange. The Estonia-based crypto exchange that was first launched in China said that it has a contingency plan to tackle the operational challenges because of the virus:

 “We might 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 cases.’’

According to the founder of Bibox, marketing and trading services were not affected but the new product development and networking events have been quite disrupted:

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

Outside of the trading platforms, other blockchain startups in the region say that they have been affected severely. The blockchain incubation center co-founded by Canaan Creative, OKEx, decided to reduce the rents for some of its startups that use offices to open a platform. Conflux, the Bejing-based blockchain firm also has trouble fighting the virus ramifications.