In the summer of 2025, large companies turned their attention to cryptocurrency abroad, sparking a war without gunpowder.
Written by: Leek, Foresight News
On August 25, one of Asia's largest cryptocurrency summits, Web X, was held at the Royal Prince Hotel Garden Tower in Tokyo, making it the largest local cryptocurrency event in Japan. On that day, Japan's newly appointed Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba attended the meeting and emphasized that Japan hopes cryptocurrency will help transform Japanese society.
It is reported that the number of attendees exceeded 10,000, most of whom were Japanese nationals. Among the small group of foreigners, an unnoticed group appeared at the venue—employees from Chinese internet giants.
The birth of cryptocurrency (2009) coincided with the peak of the PC internet era, when Tencent and Alibaba's main businesses were still experiencing explosive growth. This new financial paradigm did not attract the attention of unicorns at that time. As cryptocurrency trading and mining were repeatedly banned by Chinese regulatory authorities, such uncertain and dangerous ventures were naturally not favored by internet giants, with very few large companies investing resources to compete in this field.
But in the summer of 2025, large companies turned their attention to cryptocurrency abroad, sparking a war without gunpowder.
A person from a domestic top 3 company in Tokyo told Foresight News that their purpose for participating in this cryptocurrency summit is to find quality clients—those larger cryptocurrency exchanges—to sell their company's proprietary cloud services and large models.
It's not new for internet cloud giants to attract cryptocurrency clients. As early as 2022, a report from Pingwest revealed this hidden business: one of the world's largest cloud service providers, AWS, has its true revenue pillar in China coming from the cryptocurrency sector. Pingwest cited sources stating that 70% of AWS China's revenue comes from overseas, with 50% from the cryptocurrency sector. In other words, cryptocurrency companies contribute more than a third of AWS China's revenue.
Such a scale of revenue is hard to ignore for domestic cloud service giants. On April 30, 2025, IDC released a report on the Chinese public cloud service market (2024 second half tracking), indicating that the IaaS market size in China for the second half of 2024 is 94.82 billion RMB, a year-on-year growth of 13.8%. Alibaba Cloud ranked first in the market, with shares recovering for three consecutive quarters. Huawei ranked second, China Telecom third, China Mobile fourth, and Tencent fifth.
Foresight News learned that in the context of increasingly fierce competition in cloud services, the aforementioned non-state-owned cloud giants have established their own Web3 sales departments to compete for this 'hot cake,' including Alibaba, Tencent, and even Huawei, allowing users to browse related products directly on the front-end page. It is noteworthy that this setup is not a unique phenomenon for domestic giants; all international giants, including AWS, Google, and Microsoft, also have similar products in their cloud departments.
Foresight News also learned that the main offices of these business departments were previously located in Singapore, possibly related to the many cryptocurrency exchanges that relocated from mainland China to Singapore starting in 2021. However, as Singapore's cryptocurrency regulatory policies become very strict after June 30, 2025, this phenomenon is bound to be unsustainable.
However, the cloud demand from these offshore cryptocurrency exchanges will not decrease, which also means that competition for cloud market share will not end.
At Web X in Tokyo, two representatives from domestic social giants told Foresight News that although their business in this area started late, their target is also compliant cryptocurrency exchanges. As latecomers, this change in competition comes from the development of AI technology. 'Our large model technology is also very willing to be provided to cryptocurrency institutions. If there is a need for cloud services and large models, we are very welcome.' This strategy is also being followed by other large companies, which have mentioned that their large model interfaces can be provided.
Regarding competitors, they have done thorough research and directly pointed out that the OKX exchange chose Alibaba Cloud services. Previously, Alibaba Cloud affected cryptocurrency trading on OKX during a large-scale outage, which indirectly led to a change in Alibaba Cloud's top leadership. A representative from the aforementioned large company told Foresight News that they have secured 60% of the cloud service quota from a certain medium-sized exchange.
This war without gunpowder has been ongoing, and it has spread from the cloud service sector to the large model field. Even the cryptocurrency business, which is not recognized domestically, is thriving overseas, and all global giants do not want to miss out on this revenue.
Among domestic giants, Ant Group's layout regarding cryptocurrency is relatively advanced. Its representative told Foresight News in Tokyo that the blockchain developed by Ant will go online in September, and they are also looking for target clients. Similarly to Ant, JD.com, which is attempting to issue stablecoins in Hong Kong, revealed during this year's delivery battle that its founder Liu Qiangdong's ambition is to apply for stablecoin licenses in dozens of countries worldwide. At that time, users will be able to purchase all products with JD stablecoin, and this payment experience is something that current internet giants cannot provide.
Undoubtedly, these internet giants want cryptocurrency to become a new piece in their business landscape. Recently, Google announced the launch of its own 'public chain,' but anyone with a discerning eye knows that it is merely a consortium chain with many restrictions, far from Ethereum. This raises an interesting question: do these world's most advanced internet giants truly understand blockchain technology and the spirit of crypto punk?
As for whether internet giants from China will deeply enter the Web3 field, an employee from one of the aforementioned internet companies told Foresight News: 'As long as domestic regulatory policies do not loosen, we will never enter this field, at least not on the surface.'
