ChangXin Memory Technologies begins trading on Shanghai’s STAR Market on Monday. A market for its shares has already existed for a week and a half — not in Shanghai, but on a decentralized derivatives exchange most of the company’s domestic subscribers have never heard of and cannot legally access.

Trade.xyz deployed a pre-IPO perpetual futures contract on Hyperliquid in mid-July, on the eve of subscriptions opening for what is Asia’s largest share sale of the year and the largest semiconductor offering ever run through China’s domestic A-share market. CXMT priced at 8.66 yuan, roughly $1.28, selling 6.69 billion shares for about 10 percent of the post-offering count and raising close to $8.6 billion. Within days the on-chain contract was trading near $8. Against a post-IPO share count of 66.881 billion, that implied a valuation around $535 billion — about 6.3 times what the underwriters had just settled on with institutional bookrunners in Shanghai.

Bitmain, a privately held Chinese company, controls an estimated 80% of the global market for cryptocurrency mining hardware. The application-specific integrated circuits it manufactures — the ASICs that power the overwhelming majority of Bitcoin mining operations worldwide — are physically present inside data centers scattered across the United States, operating at sustained high power loads, networked to the internet, and in many cases located in states with significant military or defense infrastructure. In November 2025, the Department of Homeland Security opened a formal investigation into whether Bitmain’s equipment can be remotely controlled for surveillance, espionage, or grid disruption purposes.

In December 2021, the United States held approximately 38% of the global Bitcoin mining hashrate, China held 21%, and Kazakhstan held 13%. By 2024, a Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance survey covering roughly 48% of the Bitcoin network’s hashrate found that the United States accounted for 75.4% of reported power consumption among the top five countries, with Canada at 7.1%, Paraguay at 3.4%, Norway at 2.8%, and Kazakhstan at 2.6%. The redistribution was rapid and largely involuntary — driven by China’s 2021 ban on all cryptocurrency transactions rather than by any deliberate U.S. policy decision to absorb the activity.