I'm as new to ANS as many of you, but I do know a little about China and I speak Chinese, and I've seen some dangerously wrong things posted here recently. So let's use this thread as a place to post actual, sourced facts about ANS as opposed to just repeating hearsay.
Here are a few:
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
Antshares has some high profile partners listed on its site, including Wings, Alibaba, and Microsoft.
The collaboration with Wings is an R&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."
The collaboration with Microsoft relates to Microsoft Azure, specifically a legal blockchain project of some kind.
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.
Antshares is also partnered with Bancor
Despite the similiarities 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.
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.