President Xi of China’s announcement that blockchain should be a strategic goal has accelerated the expansion of Outlier Ventures, Europe’s first venture firm and incubator dedicated to blockchain technology – into China, promising the early indicators for thawing of crypto winter.
The announcement from President Xi Jinping, that blockchain should be a strategic goal for China, ahead of their state-backed digital currency sent all of the blockchain-related equities on the mainland surging, hitting the 10% daily increase limit and seeing a ‘China premium’ of 30%+ added to all related assets. China is “imminently” to launch the DCEP — the Digital Currency Electronic Payment — as a domestic stablecoin, fully backed 1-1 to the Chinese renminbi and provinces have begun to offer finance and support for blockchain projects.
Xi’s view for China to “seize the opportunity” afforded by blockchain technology came as no surprise to Outlier Ventures who is committed to China’s potential and the opportunity to bridge the gap between Europe and China. The prospect of helping Chinese investors and projects access the overseas market is an unparalleled opportunity for the global investment platform. Whilst the hub for deep tech is often associated with the west, it is the Chinese market that is adopting this new technology and creating interesting, new commercial models to support it.
Outlier Ventures in China
Outlier made Asia a key strategic pillar at the beginning of this year. They have become a trusted friend and partner to leading regional VCs as well as leading Chinese conglomerates leading in blockchain in domains like mobility and industrial environments.
Their CEO Jamie Burke was invited to be an opening keynote speaker at 8BTC’s World Blockchain Conference Wuzhen to over 4,000 attendees including several national and regional government organizations alongside the blockchain leads of Ant Financial, Baidu, China Telecom and Huawei.
Outlier made several announcements including their launch of a Chinese office in 2020 and a three-city tour (Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou) in December in association with CASH Capital, a holding company that manages the operational assets of Chinese Academy of Sciences (the world’s largest scientific research institute). They will join leading Chinese players FBG Capital to talk about blockchain’s importance to China with several western projects from their Convergence Stack including their first Chinese protocol Sperax which connects IoT hardware to the stack. He also discussed their intention to work with regional Chinese innovation and research centers to invest in joint R&D with protocols from The Stack as well as leading academic institutions interested in blockchain, AI and autonomous systems.
“The Chinese vision for blockchain technology in many ways is similar to a private blockchain being used in an enterprise environment. As an open stack, The Convergence Stack would look to integrate into and become interoperable with it in the same way it would with a private instance of any of its core protocols or say R3, Libra or even centralized ERP cloud vendors. I would argue The CStack will be the universal bridge as a global digital commodities layer that will containerize value production and flow between all these protected sovereignties be that national or corporate. We are committed to working with China on this exciting new phase in digitizing and growing the global economy. Whilst blockchain is very much in the trough of disillusionment at the moment this is where Amazons and Google get built in the technology cycle. With Facebook and the Chinese Govt entering the space it is increasingly difficult to not be long-term bullish on the potential of technology, even for the most ardent of skeptics. As more widely accepted fundamental analysis comes to the asset class and more indices track it we expect price a new blue-chip token class to emerge and price to increasingly follow real traction.’’
– Jamie Burke, CEO of Outlier Ventures
Discussion