Leaked recordings of a private conversation suggest crypto lender Babel Finance leveraged some user funds to long bitcoin and faced potential default risks during this year’s Black Thursday market crash in March. Seven audio files first emerged online on Sept. 25 that appear to be parts of a longer in-person conversation between Del Wang, co-founder of Beijing-based Babel, and an unknown person. The recordings offer a rare hint of strategies taken by the industry’s nascent crypto lenders in managing their balance sheets, suggesting some business practices may be different from what they claim. The audio files were initially uploaded to Anchor.fm […]
Wolfie Zhao
29 posts
A Chinese video site copycat raised $2.1 million via an initial exchange offering in August 2019 – but it appears this last resort wasn’t enough to save the company from falling apart. On Sept. 24, the Shanghai Yangpu District Court disclosed an Aug. 31 ruling that video streaming company Dilidili has infringed the trademark of Nasdaq-listed Bilibili and must pay a fine of nearly $500,000. The ruling followed a separate notice by the Shanghai Minhang District Prosecutor in July, which ordered the arrest of Dilidili’s founder for copyright infringement. The years-long case has drawn widespread attention among Chinese mainstream media given […]
Chinese bitcoin miner manufacturer MicroBT is looking to grab a bigger slice of the U.S. market by setting up its first overseas production center. The company said on Friday that it has partnered with New York-based Foundry Digital LLC and a Southeast Asian company in order to improve supply chain efficiencies for North American buyers of its flagship bitcoin mining equipment. The Southeast Asian listed company – which MicroBT declined to name – is contracted to produce and deliver MicroBT’s WhatsMiner equipment to U.S. investors, who would otherwise pay an additional 25% tax if they receive shipments directly from China due […]
Several Chinese state-owned media have made unusual coordinated reports describing cryptocurrencies as the year’s top performing investment. Source link
The number of pending transactions on Ethereum per minute has jumped 30% after the claim for Uniswap’s UNI token begins. The decentralized trading platform announced around 00:30 UTC time Thursday that it has launched its governance token dubbed UNI with 1 billion coins that will be released over the next four years. While the liquidity mining for the governance token will not start until Friday, Uniswap said historical users and liquidity providers on the platform are now able to claim for 400 UNI per each address. “15% of UNI [150,000,000 UNI] can immediately be claimed by historical liquidity providers, users, and […]
In a new twist in Bitmain’s ongoing power struggle, co-founder Jihan Wu has regained the legal representative status of the bitcoin miner maker giant. China’s business registration record update on Sept. 14 shows Wu has again become the legal representative and executive director of Beijing Bitmain Technology, the operating entity of Bitmain. Subsequently, Micree Zhan, the rival co-founder who was ousted last October by Wu but regained control earlier this year, is no longer the legal representative and executive director but remains a general manager of the firm. The role of a company’s legal representative in China has broad powers to […]
A major bank quietly opened up a wallet service for China’s central bank digital currency to public users – but quickly disabled it after the feature gained widespread attention. Around noon on Saturday local time, users of China Construction Bank (CCB), one of the big-four state-owned commercial banks, started to notice that a central bank digital currency wallet feature was available inside the bank’s mobile app. By searching “digital currency” in Chinese, users of the app could navigate to the digital yuan wallet service and further activate it by registering with a mobile phone number associated with their bank accounts at CCB. […]
Over 20 bitcoin mining farms in China’s Inner Mongolia have been stripped of electricity perks after a clampdown by the local government. A document issued by the Department of Industrial and Information Technology of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on Aug. 24, obtained by CoinDesk, shows the government agency has required a local electricity trade company to disqualify 21 bitcoin mining farms from participating in energy trading. Chinese crypto news source Wu Blockchain first reported the document, but did not provide the names of the farms on the list. Notable entities include two subsidiaries of bitcoin mining giant Bitmain in Inner […]
Major Chinese bitcoin mining pools are each seeing daily hash rate drops between 10 to 20 percent following continuous rainstorms in Sichuan. China’s southwestern Sichuan province, a mountainous region that is estimated to have over 50% of Bitcoin network’s total computing power, has been hit by heavy rainstorms since last week, which peaked over the last two days. The heavy rainstorms have caused electricity cut-off in parts of the region as hydro-plants stop generating power to help discharge the floods. Some counties are also experiencing telecommunication and internet breakdowns, said Kevin Pan, CEO and co-founder of PoolIn. As result, impacted bitcoin […]
The rain has come. The machines are humming. This should be the best time of the year for China’s bitcoin miners. The monsoon season, generally from June to October, brings excessive rain and thus cheap hydro electricity. But this year is different, proving to be harder than ever for China’s bitcoin miners and mining farm operators who are estimated to dominate 65% of the global multi-billion dollar bitcoin mining industry. Since last summer, many mining farm operators rushed to build new facilities in China’s southwestern region in anticipation of a dramatic price rise with bitcoin’s halving. But mining difficulty has now […]
Chinese police have arrested 27 leaders and 82 others suspected of operating the Ponzi scheme. Source link
The ongoing battle between the co-founders at Bitmain has now essentially hard forked the world’s largest bitcoin miner manufacturer into two different operations and supply chains for making its flagship AntMiner equipment. Wu Jihan, the co-founder who ousted his rival co-founder Micree Zhan Ketuan last year, registered a new entity on July 16 in Shenzhen, China. The new entity, called Guiji Yanghang, is a subsidiary of another recently incorporated company named Beijing Guiyuan Dalu, which is controlled by Wu’s side. Wu removed Zhan from Beijing Bitmain in October, following a long-time power struggle between the two. But Zhan made his comeback […]
Binance is looking to consolidate more bitcoin mining hashrate to its pool in Russia and the Central Asia region. The world’s largest crypto exchange is deploying a physical server node for its pool at BitRiver, the largest bitcoin mining hosting provider in Bratsk, Russia. The move would give miner owners at BitRiver who choose to switch to Binance a better connection and direct route to its mining pool, the two firms said in an announcement Friday. In return, Binance would gain exposure and access to customers who run their machines at BitRiver, which currently operates mining facilities at a capacity of […]
As Filecoin inches closer to a blockchain mainnet launch – after several delays since its $200 million raise in 2017 – investors in China are again speculating heavily on the network’s mining hardware and its token prices. Since Protocol Labs, the foundation behind Filecoin, released a “Testnet Incentives” program on June 9 that was scheduled to start in a week, more than a dozen Chinese companies have started selling cloud mining contracts and physical hardware – even though important details like the mining incentive economics on the mainnet are still not finalized. The sales volume so far on each of these […]
Chinese police have seized over $15 million in crypto and supercars worth $2 million from the alleged operators of a novel scam that sold counterfeit tokens. In an article published Thursday, China’s Ministry of Public Security, which oversees the country’s police forces, said police in the city of Wenzhou has arrested 10 individuals suspected of operating the fraudulent scheme. The criminal case is the first in China where victims were allegedly scammed using blockchain smart contracts to generate fake cryptocurrencies, the ministry said. Police seized amounts of the bitcoin, ether and tether cryptocurrencies with a total worth of over 100 million […]
DiDi, the Chinese equivalent of Uber, is forming a task force to design and implement a trial of China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) on its transportation platform. A spokesperson of the Chinese ride-hailing mobile service told CoinDesk in an email response that it has entered into a strategic partnership with the Digital Currency Research Institute of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) in an effort to accelerate the application of the CBDC, known as Digital Currency Electronic Payment, or DCEP. “Under PBoC’s overall DCEP strategy and operation timeline, DiDi’s DCEP taskforce will design and implement pilot DCEP projects in accordance with […]
As Chinese police step up efforts to crack down on illegal economic activities, crypto over-the-counter (OTC) traders are being detained to assist investigations. In another sign Chinese law enforcement are targeting cryptocurrency trading, Zhao Dong – a prominent Chinese crypto OTC trader and the co-founder of crypto lending platform RenrenBit – has been held up by police in the city of Hangzhou. A rumor that Zhao had been taken away first emerged on WeChat on Thursday, after a screen capture describing his detention began circulating within the local community and was later reported by local news outlets. As the rumor drew […]
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty just posted the smallest percentage change in 10 years. The bitcoin network adjusted its difficulty level at 01:18 UTC on July 1 to 15.7842 trillion – down a mere 0.0033% from the previous level of 15.7847 trillion set June 17. The percentage change is small enough that it is rounded up to a zero, data from BTC.com shows. Bitcoin mining difficulty measures how hard it is to compete for block rewards on the network. The measure is designed to adjust every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, based on the total computing power that’s participating in the mining […]
Zhan Ketuan, the formerly-ousted Bitmain co-founder who returned to power earlier this month, is proposing a solution to end the firm’s internal war. In a letter Sunday, Zhan, who as Bitmain’s biggest shareholder owns 36% of its stock, offered to buy back shares possessed by his rival co-founder Wu Jihan, several founding members and some of Bitmain employees, at a company valuation of $4 billion. Wu alone controls about 20% of Bitmain and three other founding members own about 15% in total. Bitmain’s employee stock option pool has another 19% and the remaining 10% belongs to external investors. But Zhan’s $4 […]
Bitcoin has just posted its biggest mining difficulty increase in nearly 2.5 years. At around 17:00 UTC on Tuesday, the network adjusted its difficulty level – a measure of how hard it is for miners to compete for block rewards on the blockchain – to 15.78 trillion. The 14.95% rise is the biggest difficulty jump since January 2018, which saw a larger spike on the back of the 2017 crypto market bull run, data compiled by BTC.com shows. As a result, miners contributing hashing power to the network are now facing the fourth-most difficult two-week mining period in Bitcoin’s history. The latest […]
Its employees have been forced to choose sides but now Bitmain’s customers are also in the middle of the escalating power struggle at the world’s largest bitcoin miner manufacturer. Chinese crypto media BlockBeats reported on Wednesday that since his return in early June, once-exiled co-founder Micree Zhan has halted a Shenzhen subsidiary of the Beijing-based Bitmain from shipping bitcoin miners to its clients. A China-based mining customer of Bitmain and a Bitmain staffer close to the matter confirmed to CoinDesk the temporary delivery halt at Bitmain’s Shenzhen warehouse. According to its 2018 initial public offering prospectus, Beijing Bitmain owns a subsidiary […]
Thousands of cryptocurrency over-the-counter merchants and their clients may have been affected as police in China freeze bank accounts over crypto and fiat assets tainted by illicit activity. Caught up in a police probe since last Thursday, some Chinese crypto buyers and sellers and OTC market makers have already had accounts frozen because their transactions may have been contaminated by money laundering activities involving cryptocurrencies. Sun Xiaoxiao, a former staffer at Chinese crypto wallet startup Bixin who now runs an OTC desk, wrote in a Weibo post on Friday that his bank accounts had been frozen and that it was not […]
Staff at Bitmain now have a decision to make: whether to return to the office and which executive they choose to take orders from. Micree Zhan Ketuan, the Bitmain co-founder who was ousted in a coup by his rival Wu Jihan last October, sent out a letter addressed to Bitmain employees via his WeChat feed on Thursday, saying he had returned to the company’s Beijing office starting from June 3. He further called for staffers at Bitmain to return to the office to join him and said he will “lead the company to complete an initial public offering as soon as […]
Poolin, the second largest bitcoin mining pool, is expanding its cryptocurrency lending and financial services businesses. The pool announced Monday that it has started working with U.S.-based crypto lender BlockFi, which will be acting like an interbank lender, providing a source of capital for Poolin. The firm initially rolled out crypto lending offerings in February via its Singapore-registered wallet entity, Blockin. With more capital now available, Poolin will be able to extend the business to more miner customers, offering annualized interest at levels that can be below 6%. Miners that connect to the pool currently have about 18.3 exahashes per second […]
The Bitcoin network just fine-tuned a key parameter to coax back miners who quit after last week’s halving hammered their profits. More than 20 exahashes per second (EH/s) of computing power – the equivalent of around 1.5 million older-generation mining machines – has been switched off from Bitcoin since the network’s halving. The 7-day rolling average of Bitcoin’s hash rate has dropped over 20% from around 122 EH/s just prior to the halving on May 11 to now 97 EH/s. The once-in-four-years event reduced miners’ block rewards from 12.5 to 6.25 bitcoin (BTC) per block. The hash rate drop after the […]
Bitcoin’s third halving, the network’s quadrennial landmark and the most anticipated event this year in the cryptocurrency industry, has finally happened. Miners racing on the network to compete for freshly minted bitcoin produced the 630,000th block at 19:23 UTC on May 11, which triggered the programmed halving event, marking another milestone in the currency’s 11-year history. The first block in the new 6.25-bitcoin-per-block mining cycle was mined and relayed by China-based Antpool, the fourth-largest mining pool by total computing power. In an homage to Satoshi Nakamoto’s iconic “brink of a second bailout” message in the 2009 genesis block, f2pool, which mined […]
Founded in 2013, the Beijing-based Bitmain Technology remains at the center of the crypto economy. With its flagship AntMiner bitcoin mining equipment still dominating the hardware market and its mining pools accounting for about a quarter of the bitcoin network’s computing power, it retains a uniquely powerful place in the ecosystem of by far the largest cryptocurrency and blockchain project. That’s not to say it isn’t also controversial. Its vocal support for a Bitcoin hard fork (Bitcoin Cash) in 2017, following contentious community disagreement, won the company, and its masterminds, many enemies. This post is part of the CoinDesk 50, an […]
After Micree Ketuan Zhan, the exiled co-founder of Bitmain, moved to reinstate his position after another partial legal victory over his former employer, tensions reportedly escalated into a physical brawl. According to a source close to Zhan, who was ousted by his rival co-founder Wu Jihan last October, the former executive was recently granted the right to recover his status as the legal representative of Beijing Bitmain Technology by the Beijing Haidian District Justice Bureau. On Friday morning local time, as Zhan attended the bureau to collect his new registration license as part of the recovery process, he was surrounded by […]
Bixin, one of the earliest bitcoin miner operators and wallet startups, is dedicating 6600 bitcoin, worth $66 million, to a new fund of funds. The company announced the fund of funds with its proprietary capital on Friday and said it aims to invest in global quantitative trading funds whose strategies are based on arbitrage, bitcoin futures contracts and trend analysis. By providing additional liquidity and market making activities to these trading desks amid bitcoin’s scheduled halving event, Bixin seeks to increase its holdings in bitcoin as part of its “unwavering commitment to bitcoin,” the firm said in the announcement. “We are […]