ADOU-阿斗

The National Data Group sounds impressive. But dig beneath the surface and it boils down to this: it wants to bring the country’s data landlords under one roof. They each control their own patch and none of them is willing to let go. The result? They’re all data landlords themselves. The company was set up with their pooled money, so the people doing the acquiring and the ones being acquired are all on the same side. It has 30 billion yuan in registered capital and was launched in Xiong’an. It’s the 100th central state-owned enterprise. It all looks like quite a show, but the show is for outsiders. Take a closer look at its shareholders: State Grid, China Southern Power Grid, and the three major telecom operators. They’re all state-backed, and they all control the pipelines. Who are these people? The ones who hold the data behind the walls. Getting a bunch of landlords who each rule their own hill to fund a company that’s supposed to take over their land is awkward from the start. How do you expect to fight that battle? The opponents are the shareholders. Rely on negotiation? Dream on. The only option is heavy-handed pressure from higher up. Market mechanisms won’t work here. And history offers two ready-made examples of consolidation imposed by force: the broadcasting industry’s “one network” initiative and the railway mergers. Both were national-level consolidations, yet even today they’re mostly just on paper: the paperwork was merged, but the people weren’t. Even more awkward, the assets don’t match the pitch. The truly valuable data is in the hands of Tencent, ByteDance, Alibaba, and the like: social, transaction, and consumer data. None of that has anything to do with this group; it’s not in its bowl. What it wants to bring under its umbrella is government data and data on water, electricity, and gas—all legacy data from old systems, isolated information silos, a dime a dozen. Low value, highly sensitive: it has the worst of both worlds. It can’t fetch a good price, and the moment you touch it, it blows up. You can’t monetize it, and trying to do so means crossing a red line—and you’re almost certain to cross one. To monetize it, you have to overstep; if you don’t, all your effort is for nothing. These data are like chicken ribs: not worth eating, but too wasteful to throw away. They’re classic stranded assets. Trying to build a business worth hundreds of billions of yuan out of them isn’t ambition; it’s an illusion. Try to make a feast out of chicken ribs, and the whole thing disappears as soon as the fire is lit. Then there was the big wave of getting data assets onto balance sheets, sweeping everything along with it. One more line appeared in the accounting entries. Put simply, it was cosmetic accounting. As long as the books looked good, that was enough. Put an inflated price on the data and write it into the accounts, and suddenly assets appear out of nowhere. The balance sheet looks better, the scale grows, and the numbers look impressive. You can even use the data as collateral to borrow money. But good-looking books don’t mean anyone will pay, let alone that there’ll be cash flow. Numbers on a balance sheet can’t pay salaries. Inside the system, nobody dares to puncture that illusion; whoever does will be held responsible. More seriously, the law still hasn’t clarified who owns the data. No one dares to make the call. The rules aren’t settled, but the work starts anyway. It’s like getting on the train before buying a ticket and sorting it out later—buying the ticket while the train is already moving. Get started first: if it works, it’s called innovation; take one wrong step, and you’ve crossed a red line. So don’t be dazzled by the words “national team.” A big name doesn’t mean it can get things done. Its direction isn’t wrong, but in this industry, failure has never been about choosing the wrong direction. It’s about execution. The real risk isn’t that it fails to build a data business. It’s that it ends up as a monopolistic transfer station. The data still won’t flow; instead, there’ll be one more tollbooth. And a new kind of rent-seeking around data will emerge. In short, the table is big and the seat is high. But taking a seat doesn’t mean you’ll win. And when you lay out the hand it’s holding, there aren’t many truly valuable cards.

To tell the story of Liangshan’s silver ingots, we first have to talk about opium!
In the late Qing dynasty and early Republican period, opium ran rampant across China, and Liangshan was no exception.
Around 1910, the Yi people of Liangshan began growing opium like crazy, turning entire hillsides into poppy fields. When harvest time came, opium was as hot as fresh naan—everyone wanted it!
Traders from outside brought salt, cloth, iron goods, and even guns to trade for our opium. The scale of the business was enough to make your heart race!
Back then, people in Liangshan didn’t think much of paper money. Everyone had their eyes fixed on silver, especially those gleaming silver ingots.

The “legends” of Uniswap and Hyperliquid are stories of two projects that defined decentralized trading in different eras through entirely opposite paths. One pioneered the AMM (automated market maker) model, built from scratch by an “unemployed young man”; the other was a high-performance, trading-specific blockchain built by an “18-person team of quant geeks.”
🦄 Uniswap: The “Accidental Revolution” of an Unemployed Young Man and AMMs
Uniswap’s story began with a layoff. Its founder, Hayden Adams, was a mechanical engineer at Siemens. After being laid off in 2017, he taught himself Solidity programming from scratch at a friend’s urging.
His goal was simple: to realize an automated market-making concept proposed by Vitalik Buterin. Uniswap v1 launched in November 2018 with no funding, no token, and a founder whose Twitter account had just 200 followers.