IPFS Sounds the Alarm Again
After the end of the first round of the Filecoin space race, the enthusiasm of the market has not diminished, and the second round of the competition is about to come out. The market still maintains enthusiasm for the distributed storage sector, and some investors have turned their focus to mining machine-related test data.
Amidst the applause, in recent months, there have been reports in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou that Filecoin-related mining machine manufacturers have been interviewed and equipment confiscated. These incidents are not unique.
Obviously, some potential risks have been overlooked by investors.
In the first half of 2020, IPFS once became the focus of the industry. With the rising price of FIL futures, the ecology related to IPFS is gradually growing.
In mid-September, with the end of the first round of the Filecoin Space Race, many miners around the world were attracted by the competition rewards of up to 4.6 million FIL, and they enthusiastically participated. At present, the official is also actively preparing for the opening of the second round of competition, and the market still maintains the enthusiasm for the distributed storage sector.
However, Blocklike found that when distributed storage solution providers, established investment institutions, and individual investors who have purchased cloud computing power are all focusing on the competition data of mining machine manufacturers, some mining machine manufacturers are face regulatory risk.
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Be wary of potential risks
In the first half of this year, distributed storage was a hot topic. Just 2 months ago, Filecoin, as a star project in the industry, had a good time, and became one of the few directions of large inflow of funds 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 can easily understand and accept it. At that time, when hot spots were relatively scarce, various institutions entered one after another. From the development of the Filecoin industry chain, it can be seen that Filecoin has still formed a complete chain of upstream capital, mining machine vendors, and project parties, middle-level user groups, developers, and ecological participants, and downstream media, transactions, and consulting. Closed loop ecology.
At the Hangzhou Blockchain Week held at the end of July, according to incomplete statistics, there were about 200-300 participating mining machine sellers. In that week, distributed storage-themed activities accounted for all About 70-80% of more than 40 offline activities.
According to non-small data, as of September 25, Fil has increased by 367.04% this year, and its price peaked in July at nearly $28.25.
It can be seen that under the current situation of high popularity of IPFS, distributed storage solution providers, investment institutions with existing layout, media who observe hot topics, and individual investors who have purchased cloud computing power, all focus on Focused on topics such as the effective computing power ranking list, the number of pledged tokens in the entire network, the total computing power of the entire network, and the average block generation time, while ignoring some of its potential risks.
Coincidentally, when the news that some IPFS-related concept manufacturers in the Beijing area were seized by the Ministry of Public Security, in late August, there were also IPFS mining machine-related manufacturers in Shenzhen, Hangzhou and other places that were interviewed by economic investigation. According to Blocklike’s information from people familiar with the matter, earlier in Hangzhou, there had already been interviews with IPFS-related companies by economic investigations, and some mining machine manufacturers had to change their office locations after the interviews.
According to experience, when IPFS/Filecoin faces domestic supervision, it mainly follows two principles: 1. Whoever owns the node is responsible; 2. Whoever distributes it is responsible.
The above-mentioned person familiar with the matter told Blocklike: "The stigma of IPFS is still very strong now. There were a lot of fraudulent activities under the concept of IPFS before. Some regulatory actions may be due to concerns about these previous fraud cases. It may also be that some companies The marketing is overdone."
Another investor from the industry believes that the main reason why some IPFS vendors are interviewed is "issuing currency" or "involving currency". In fact, in order to prevent and control fraud cases of related concepts, certain time points will become the focus of prevention and investigation by regulatory agencies every year.
In fact, in the field of IPFS, negative brand information and policy risks have always been one of the concerns of investors.
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Lawyer's point of view
Blocklike contacted Mr. Chen Yunfeng, a senior partner of Zhonglun W&D Law Firm. His opinion is: "Because there are quite a lot of MLM activities under the banner of IPFS. In name, mining and coin mining are actually The number of spam projects that use this as an excuse is large and the scope is relatively wide.”
Lawyer Chen Yunfeng said: "If interviews with the police are involved, it is mainly to investigate in advance and ask the other party to explain. For example, the company's address, organization, personnel, business type, and operation method need to be explained. Innocent”, if your business has passed the line, then it may be cleared. As for the impact on legal persons and their companies, if it is a company that operates legally, it is not a big problem; if it is indeed an air currency , pyramid schemes, fund-raising fraud, etc., may have more serious consequences. It is recommended that practitioners pay enough attention to this situation.”
Due to the advanced information technology in first- and second-tier cities such as Beijing, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou, and the large number of related enterprises and organizations involved in a wide range of areas, the impact of many incidents may also be relatively large.
Ni Can, a lawyer at Beijing Yingke (Hangzhou) Law Firm, has a lot of experience in consulting in the blockchain field in Hangzhou. What he has learned so far is: "According to my understanding of IPFS-related businesses, the business itself involves virtual currency and mines. Machines belong to the field of strict supervision in terms of policies and laws, and it is normal for the regulatory authorities to take precautions against this. At present, from the perspective of the business chain, from selling mining machines to selling cloud storage or cloud computing power, some even involve private equity or futures. Class. If it simply involves the sale of mining machines, the criminal legal risk is relatively small, and business faults may involve civil disputes such as false publicity and returns. However, if businesses such as cloud storage and futures are involved, there may be risks involving illegal operations , There are also some people in the market who purely use the name of IPFS to make funds, fraud, of course, there is no doubt that they are involved in criminal offenses.”
While the concept of distributed storage continues to heat up, Blocklike hereby reminds all investors that they should maintain risk awareness when participating in Filecoin mining machine investment, and improve the information screening ability of mining machine manufacturers to avoid losses.
