We all know that in the market of liquid domains Chinese Premiums command a premium.
We also know that it happened within last year and many of us follow the lead.
But to understand the future trends, it is also important to answer the question: is there any intrinsic value for westerners in the domains that have ChiP (not WeChiP) letters?
Would you prefer to start a project with something like znxw that is supposedly worth $2,500 or something more pronounceable/communicable in the West that is priced currently at $300-500 if you were given an option to get one of the names for your project free of charge (no option to resell)?
If "znxw" represented a meaningful acronym for the project, then yes. Otherwise there would be no point. High CHIP floor prices do not correspond in any way with high/any end user value, and does not give previously meaningless letter combinations any value now just because they suddenly cost minimum $2500.
CHIPs are supposed to be pinyin acronyms, each letter corresponding to a Chinese character. So while these Chinese premiums can have meaning in a Chinese context, they are still just meaningless sequences of consonants for western end users.
And at this stage, the whole premium Chinese letters and numbers boom has lost sight of Chinese end users almost entirely. Are end users going to pay end user prices for millions newly hand registered 7N.com, 8N.com, 9N.com, 5L.com 4L.org that already are starting to have increasingly higher reseller prices? (and .ORG extension is almost non-existent in terms of actual use in China, so the 4L.ORG "CHIPSs" thing does not make any logical sense if you think about end user potential. However, the market simply decided to buyout and push up the prices for this extension, and that's what happened). And domains that actually have end user potential have so high reseller prices now that most end users can't afford them anyway.
While this boom is all about CHIPs, the Chinese companies (larger ones at least) often use acronyms of their English names as their domain name, and not acronyms of their Chinese names, and these are often acronyms with non CHIP letters in them (if you have an acronym for the whole Chinese name of a company, it would usually be very long, and would require far more letters to represent each Chinese character if you have a letter for each of the Chinese characters in the whole Chinese name - often 6-12+ letters - although in many cases they may use a shorter form, i.e. just the first 4 pinyin letters of their Chinese name). English acronyms like this are common:
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China = ICBC.com.cn
China National Offshore Oil Corporation = cnooc.com.cn
Dongfeng Motor Corporation = dfmc.com.cn
These companies of course have Chinese names too, and could have chosen to use a CHIP acronym if they wished.
Some people have compared the Chinese domains boom to a form of cryptocurrency for Chinese, an alternative trading platform to the stock market, simply a way of money laundering (even gambling in Macau has actively been used for money laundering up until more tight government controls recently - Vegas gambling revenue is tiny compared to Macaus) as well as a way of moving funds out of China/switching RMB into US$, a pyramid scheme (since some domainers in the know early on bought up thousands of domains in bulk, while increasingly many new-comers enter the market, paying increasingly inflated prices for these hand regs) and many other things. While I can't say which of these are more correct or accurate description of what is going on, I think these factors play a more central part in this equation than "end users" do right now.
