AntShares Up over 100% in the last week! What we know so far:

Antshares has exploded in price the last few days.  I wanted to clarify somethings about what Antshare is and why the sudden price increase.  

From Antshare's website:

"As China's  first ever original and open source  public chain project,  Antshares serves as a smart assets platform. Smart assets are the  combination of smart contract of blockchain and digital assets.  Antshares allows for a smarter way for assets registration, issuance,  and circulation. "

Antshares has been compared to Ethereum of China.  This week Antshares is attending a conference and are expected to announce their introduction of smart contracts to their product. 

You can think of buying Antshares like buying a stock.  Instead of proof of work, Antshares runs on a process similar to proof of stake.  It is different in that you receive Antcoins from holding Antshares.  These Antcoins are similar to Gas in Ethereum.  

From Reddit User u/landoindisguise 

  

1. ANS was developed by a company called Onchain, based in Shanghai. Da Hongfei is the CEO of Onchain as well as the creator of Antshares
2. Antshares has some high profile partners listed on its site, including Wings, Alibaba, and Microsoft. 
3. The collaboration with Wings is anR&D partnership.  From Wings's press release: "The strategic cooperation enables European  and North American DAO projects to into tap the Chinese cryptocurrency  community, and Chinese start-ups to do the same with European and North  American communities. Further, the two organizations agree to coordinate  resources on mutual business opportunities, and promote joint  hackathons to drive ecosystem innovation."
4. The collaboration with Microsoft relates to Microsoft Azure, specifically a legal blockchain project of some kind.
5. The Alibaba collaboration entails a partnership between ONCHAIN and Ali Cloud working on "proof-of-existence for a blockchain-powered email evidence  repository as a bottom-layer framework designed for enterprise-level  use.
6. Antshares is also partnered with Bancor
7. Despite the similarities in name and logo, Antshares is not  connected or affiliated with Ant Financial, Alibaba's fintech spinoff,  as far as I can tell. Ant Financial has created at least one blockchain thing of its own. 
8. Reps from Antshares have attended at least one government-sponsored industry conference on blockchain.  It also appears Antshares held a blockchain competition in  collaboration with a committee of the Shanghai municipal government (on  antshares official site). However, from my own experience with China I  would caution readers not to assume this means anything at all. I  haven't seen anything yet that suggests Antshares is "backed" or  "endorsed" by the Chinese government as some people on here have  claimed. Regulatory risk is real AF when it comes to China (especially crypto in China) so proceed with that in mind. 

It seems that Antshares is currently peaking a lot of interest in the crypto world.  It looks as though a lot of people are getting FOMO and trying to buy into Antshares without knowing anything about it.  I just want to help everyone out there be more informed in the crypto world.  There is a lot of misinformation out there on the web.