The black swan is looming. Will the overheating of platform coins trigger the risk of central bank supervision?

Recently, platform coins, led by OK Group's OKB, have seen a surge in prices. OKB destroyed 700 million unissued OKBs at one time, triggering a surge in the overall price of platform coins. Subsequently, ZB, Fcoin, and others followed suit. Soon after, MX, the token of the Matcha exchange, and Huobi HT also took corresponding actions to increase the intensity of destruction. Platform coins have seen an overall surge.

The conversion of platform coins to public chains has also become a consensus among various exchanges. For this purpose, OK will also issue a new public chain token OKT. The new public chains of platforms such as Huobi have not yet announced whether they will issue new tokens.

Wu said blockchain has analyzed that due to the halving of mainstream currencies, the expansion of platform boundaries, and competition for existing users, the rise of mainstream platform currencies in 2020 along with the rise of platform influence is an inevitable trend. Competition between platform currencies will become the main battlefield for platforms to compete with each other and compete for users.

However, for several major platform currencies, there is also a potential black swan event, namely the regulatory policy of the Chinese central bank authorities.

First, the main holders and speculators of the major platform coins that are currently surging are mostly Chinese users. OKB has carried out large-scale publicity in China, but there is almost no voice outside the country. The central bank has stated that it will further strengthen supervision on the behavior of setting up servers abroad to provide virtual currency trading services to domestic residents, and continue to strengthen the cleanup and rectification from the payment and settlement end. This indicates that there may be more risks of "freezing cards" when purchasing platform coins in the future.

Second, small and medium-sized platforms frequently follow up with chaos, which can easily lead to mass incidents. For example, Fcoin experienced an overall downtime incident, and users had to withdraw their coins via email. It was rumored that the technical staff deleted the relevant modules of the website because they were dissatisfied with the platform coin destruction policy. The situation is still developing. The platform coin policies of small and medium-sized exchanges are often more radical, and once problems arise, they may cause mass incidents that the authorities are most afraid of.

Third, since the crackdown in November last year, we can see that the policies of the regulatory authorities have become more targeted. For example, they specifically require the supervision of overseas institutions on the dissemination of domestic users, and specifically emphasize the supervision of derivatives such as lending and financial management. This shows that the regulatory authorities are strengthening their understanding of virtual currencies and are also updating their supervision. Especially after the entry of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the monitoring of social media information will be more timely. It is impossible for the regulatory authorities not to pay attention to the movements of platform currencies of core users in China.

In fact, each major platform has different attitudes towards regulatory policies: HT is extremely cautious and does not seem to care about pulling up the market through marketing means. It can be seen that there is almost no HT-related communication on Huobi’s Chinese Weibo, which is basically domestic compliant blockchain technology and related popular science; the Matcha Exchange Weibo has pinned the relevant platform coin destruction policy, and promoted the rise of platform coins, while grabbing the leverage gameplay of platform coins; Binance aims at globalization and has not followed up on this wave of platform coins that are mainly used by domestic users.

OKB's attitude is very radical, and many executives have promoted it in many domestic media and communities. Wu said blockchain found that OKEX's Chinese Weibo directly educated users on how to use RMB and Alipay to buy OKB and Bitcoin. The risks of such an approach are well known. Previously, the central bank had issued a clear ban on the promotion of virtual currency projects or platforms, and on the deployment of overseas servers to conduct ICO and virtual currency trading business for domestic residents. There are also many examples of frozen cards for buying and selling coins through Alipay.

Behind OK's radical attitude, there is a choice of market strategy, that is, to push the benefits to the highest point; or perhaps there is confidence in government relations. Xu Mingxing once proposed concepts such as "donating to the country at any time" and "the government can have a super private key", which should be appreciated by regulators, and the relationship with financial bureaus in Beijing and other places is also very deep.

However, as platform coins of large, medium and small platforms are surging overall, and most of their users are Chinese users, the possibility and risk of regulatory intervention in the future are increasing rapidly. This is also one of the black swan events that platform coins may face in 2020, and investors need to pay attention.