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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]