STEPN on Friday said it would stop providing Global Positioning System (GPS) and Internet Protocol (IP) location services to users in mainland China starting mid-July.
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Fast facts
- STEPN said the move was made to abide by Chinese regulations and that it had never engaged in any business on the mainland.
- China’s new Personal Information Protection Law that came into effect on Nov. 1 requires any cross-border data transfers to be submitted first to the cyber and data protection regulator there.
- It wasn’t immediately clear how STEPN services could be used after July 15 without the tracking of GPS and IP data.
- STEPN did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
- Jerry H, one of STEPN’s founders, said in a Discord channel that less than 5% of its users are from mainland China.
- The price of STEPN’s token GMT has dropped 38.10% in the last 24 hours to $0.8473, according to CoinMarketCap.
- See Wan Toong, the CTO of the Singapore-based game developer Red Door Digital, told Forkast that China is always a market that attracts interest, but the question will be regarding regulation.
- “The China market is still worth engaging, and will become increasingly accessible when regulation becomes clearer,” said Toong.
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