Conflux — a blockchain company that enjoys government endorsement in some parts of China — announced today that it had launched Tethys, the final stage of its three-phase mainnet launch strategy for deploying its network to the public.
“In our first two phases, we fine tuned the performance and the security of the network. Now Conflux is fully decentralized,” Fan Long, Conflux Network co-founder, told Forkast.News. “The launch of Tethys — our final phase — marks a significant moment for all applications on the network. They no longer need to worry about the migration during updates and any change to the Conflux ledger state is now permanent.”
Conflux Network is an open-source, layer-1 blockchain protocol delivering heightened scalability, security, and extensibility for the next generation of open commerce, decentralized applications, financial services and Web 3.0. The company is also something of a unicorn in the blockchain world.
While other blockchain companies have tried to penetrate China’s market with mixed success, Conflux — a Singapore-registered company — has received endorsements from the Shanghai and Hunan governments. The endorsements mean the company is officially accepted and enjoys a special status for winning government contracts in those regions.
As Forkast.News has previously reported, Hunan has a three-year blockchain plan for building 10 blockchain-based public service platforms and five blockchain industrial parks that would create 3 billion yuan — or nearly half a billion USD — in revenue. Conflux will be assisting Hunan with sharing and verifying all government administrative data on a blockchain.
“Blockchain is the most influential technology of our time and it will eventually change every aspect of our society,” Long said. “Trust is a fundamental aspect to society and blockchain will revolutionize how it is established between humans and technology.” Long said.
Aside from its endorsements and work with the Hunan government, Conflux is also involved in a project its calling “Open DeFi” which aims to bring DeFi into China — quite the feat considering that China has virtually banned cryptocurrencies in-country.
“The goals of Open DeFi are firstly to improve security and liquidity across geographies, across applications, across networks, including from CeFi [centralized finance] to DeFi. And then secondly, to drive innovation across both the Western and Asian markets,” Conflux’s Eden Dhaliwal, its global managing director, told Forkast in a recent interview. “We want to enable financial innovation, financial engineering that’s going to develop new products, new services for the China market.”
“What we’re doing is demonstrating the value of public blockchain to the government,: Dhaliwal added. “Part of that is onboarding government use cases and continuing to build this case for public networks.”
Founded in 2018, Conflux has raised $35 million, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Sequoia China and Baidu Ventures. Unlike many other blockchain infrastructure providers, Conflux has never done an ICO.