After the first round of the Filecoin Space Race, the market continued to be enthusiastic, and a second round was on the way. The market continues to maintain the enthusiasm for distributed storage sector, some investors focus on mining machine related test data.
Amid the outcry, Filecoin-related miners have been interviewed and their equipment confiscated in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou in recent months. These incidents are not unique.
Clearly, some potential risks are being overlooked by investors.
In the first half of 2020, IPFS became the focus of industry attention. With FIL futures prices rising all the way, the IPFS-related ecology is gradually growing.
As the first round of the Filecoin Space Race ended in mid-September, miners around the world rushed to take part, attracted by the 4.6 million FIL prizes on offer. At present, the authorities are also actively preparing to open the second round of the competition, the market is still maintaining the enthusiasm for the distributed storage sector.
However, it is found that while distributed storage solution providers, existing investment institutions, and individual investors who have bought cloud computing power are paying attention to mining machine manufacturer competition data, some mining machine manufacturers are facing regulatory risks.
According to an industry investor familiar with IDC business, in some regions including Beijing, a certain number of IPFS concept-related manufacturer equipment has been detained by the Ministry of Public Security, mainly involving the project parties that have issued coins.
Be alert to potential risks
Distributed storage was a hot topic in the first half of this year. Just two months ago, Filecoin, the star project in the industry, was one of the few places to see significant inflows of money in the first half of 2020.
Because the investment logic of distributed storage is clear and the concept is easy to understand, both traditional investors and people in the industry are easy to understand and accept. In the case of lack of hot spots at that time, all kinds of institutions have entered one after another. The development of the Filecoin industry chain shows that Filecoin still forms a complete closed loop ecology for upstream capital, mining operators, project parties, middle tier user groups, developers, ecological participants, and downstream media, trading, consulting, etc.
In the previous Hangzhou Blockchain Week held at the end of July, according to incomplete statistics, the number of mining machine vendors attending the event was about 200-300. In that week, activities themed on distributed storage accounted for 70-80% of all the more than 40 offline activities.
As of September 25, FIL is up 367.04 percent so far this year and peaked at nearly $28.25 in July, according to non-small data.
As you can see, in the current IPFS under the condition of high temperature, distributed storage solution provider, for the layout of the investment institutions and observe the hot topic of media, bought the cloud to calculate force of individual investors, are focused on the list, so effective to calculate force pledge tokens, quantity, so finally force and average out the pieces on topics such as time, While ignoring some of its potential risks.
Coincident, when news leaked out that some IPFS related concept manufacturers in Beijing were detained by the Ministry of Public Security, in late August, some IPFS mining machine related manufacturers in Shenzhen, Hangzhou and other places had been interviewed by economic investigation. According to Blocklike, a source with knowledge of the matter, earlier in Hangzhou, there had been a case that the economic investigation had interviewed IPFS-related enterprises, and some mining machine manufacturers had to change their office locations after the interview.
As a rule of thumb, when it comes to domestic regulation, IPFS/Filecoin mainly follows two principles: 1, whose node is responsible for who, and who is responsible for distributing who. “There is still a lot of stigma attached to IPFS, and some of the regulatory action may be due to concerns over previous cases of IPFS scams. It may also be that some companies have overmarketed it.”
Another investor from the industry believes that the main reason why some IPFS manufacturers are being interviewed lies in the “issue of currency” or “involved in currency”. In fact, in order to prevent and control the related concept of fraud cases, there will be certain time nodes every year to become the focus of prevention and investigation by regulators.
In fact, in the IPFS field, negative brand information, policy risk has been one of the concerns of investors.
Undeniably, since 2017, before the Filecoin test network was launched, “Filecoin” and other words were used by criminals to scam. In the early days, there were even fake mining machines everywhere, and the money plate was rampant, making IPFS concept appear at the same time as the money plate and other fraud cases. Filecoin has also had a negative impact.
Lawyers view
His view is: “because now under the banner of IPFS MLM coin behavior is quite a lot, nominally to mining, mining coins, in fact, as an excuse for the spam project, the number is large, the range is also relatively wide.”
Lawyer says: “If involve the police questioning, which is mainly investigate and let the other side to explain in advance, such as the need to show the address of the company, organization, personnel, business types, operations, etc., need to be questioning people” from the innocent “, if your business has crossed the line behavior, then it may be repel. For legal person and its the impact of the company, If it is a legally compliant company, it is not a big problem; if it is indeed an air coin, pyramid scheme, fund-raising fraud, etc., it may have serious consequences. I suggest that practitioners pay enough attention to this situation.”
As Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and other first-tier and second-tier cities have developed information technology, a large number of relevant enterprises and institutions and a wide range of involvement, the impact of many incidents may also be relatively large.
Ni Can, a lawyer from Beijing Yingke (Hangzhou) Law Firm, has a lot of experience in consulting in the field of block chain in Hangzhou. What he has learned is as follows: “According to my understanding of IPFS related business, the business itself involves the virtual currency and mill, in the field of policy and law belong to the strict regulation, regulators have prevention is also normal. At present, from the business chain, from selling mining machine to sell cloud storage or cloud is force, and even some involve such private or futures. If pure is involved in mining machine for sale, The criminal legal risk is relatively small, and the business fault may involve false publicity and civil disputes such as return of goods. However, if it involves cloud storage and futures business, it may involve illegal operation risk, and there are also some funds in the market under the name of IPFS, fraud, of course, will undoubtedly involve criminal crimes.”
As the concept of distributed storage continues to grow, investors should be aware of risks when investing in Filecoin mining machines, and improve their ability to identify mining machine manufacturers to avoid losses.