Are there any recent updates on this? It should be high priority...
Totally agree. Obviously, China is driving the BTC rise, with 80-85% of the volume. A few pages back, there was some speculation about how easy it is for Chinese folks to circumvent controls using BTC, with the implication being that there is no real need for XMR.
May be completely true, and this is COMPLETELY unscientific and patently simplistic, but the alt I keep track of as a proxy for the Chinese alt market is Ruby. Just look at the volume and price increases in the past 6-8 weeks. It is up 10x since August. Clearly, some of the Chinese volume IS going into alts, not just BTC.