Asia Blockchain Accelerator (ABA, 亞洲區塊鏈加速器) yesterday said it aims to support local blockchain applications and founders with a focus on compliance, track record and longevity.
ABA, in collaboration with the ACE Exchange and ACE Blockchain Fund, would provide a wide range of assistance to Taiwanese and foreign blockchain entrepreneurs that includes investment resources, training and business development, it said at a news conference.
ABA aims to build an ecosystem to maximize the business potential of blockchain technology, which is poised to disrupt many aspects of how businesses and economies work, ABA chief executive officer David Pan (潘奕彰) said.
GLOBAL NETWORK
ABA has a global partnership network, which is to provide a great launch pad for blockchain-related start-ups in Taiwan to expand overseas, Pan said.
ABA is subsidized by the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Small and Medium Enterprise Administration, with the goal of making Taiwan Asia’s blockchain hub.
Blockchain technology has taken the world by storm, with 84 percent of global executives saying that their organizations have some involvement, a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey showed.
The technology’s business value is expected to surpass US$3.1 trillion by 2030, Gartner said.
The Executive Yuan has set a goal of growing the digital industry’s output to NT$6.5 trillion (US$209.7 billion) by 2025.
ABA aims to be the most powerful blockchain accelerator in Asia and create more than NT$1 billion in business value in two years, it said.
“We will incubate at least 10 start-ups and increase partnership value,” Pan said, adding that LongHash, the largest blockchain incubator in Asia, is ABA’s strategic partner.
POSEIDON
Poseidon Network, founded by blog platform Wretch Co (無名小站) founder Light Lin (林弘全), aims to initialize a blockchain-enabled content delivery network in Taiwan, Lin said.
Working with ABA, Poseidon is seeking to prove to the world that it is an example of successful blockchain application.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
A proposed 100 percent tariff on chip imports announced by US President Donald Trump could shift more of Taiwan’s semiconductor production overseas, a Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) researcher said yesterday. Trump’s tariff policy will accelerate the global semiconductor industry’s pace to establish roots in the US, leading to higher supply chain costs and ultimately raising prices of consumer electronics and creating uncertainty for future market demand, Arisa Liu (劉佩真) at the institute’s Taiwan Industry Economics Database said in a telephone interview. Trump’s move signals his intention to "restore the glory of the US semiconductor industry," Liu noted, saying that
AI: Softbank’s stake increases in Nvidia and TSMC reflect Masayoshi Son’s effort to gain a foothold in key nodes of the AI value chain, from chip design to data infrastructure Softbank Group Corp is building up stakes in Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the latest reflection of founder Masayoshi Son’s focus on the tools and hardware underpinning artificial intelligence (AI). The Japanese technology investor raised its stake in Nvidia to about US$3 billion by the end of March, up from US$1 billion in the prior quarter, regulatory filings showed. It bought about US$330 million worth of TSMC shares and US$170 million in Oracle Corp, they showed. Softbank’s signature Vision Fund has also monetized almost US$2 billion of public and private assets in the first half of this year,