A former official of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank, has expressed disappointment that China’s digital yuan is seeing little use. Xie Ping, a former PBOC research director and current finance professor at Tsinghua University, made critical public comments about China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) at a recent university conference, according to a Dec. 28 Caixin report. Xie noted that cumulative digital yuan transactions had only crossed $14 billion (100 billion yuan) in October, two years after launch. “The results are not ideal,” he said, adding that “usage has been low, highly inactive.” Despite the …

According to a report published by state-owned daily news program Xinwen Lianbo on Dec. 29, Xiao Yi, former Communist Party Secretary of the City of Fuzhou, pleaded guilty to corruption charges in the Zhejiang Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court. During his tenure as director from 2008 to 2021, Yi was accused of accepting over 125 million CNY ($18 million) in bribes related to construction programs and illicit promotions. In addition to the aforementioned counts, Yi also pleaded guilty to charges related to business transactions between himself and Bitcoin (BTC) miners from 2017 to 2021. It is unclear if the series of …

Cryptocurrency mining giant Canaan continues to generate significant revenues from crypto operations despite the ongoing crypto mining crisis. Canaan’s total revenue for the first nine months of 2022 was roughly 4 billion Chinese yuan (RMB), or about $573 million, a spokesperson for Canaan told Cointelegraph. As the firm expects to generate another 310 million RMB ($46 million) in Q4, the total annual revenues is expected to amount to 4.3 billion RMB ($619 million). The amount is down around 14% from Canaan’s RMB-denominated revenue of 4.9 billion RMB last year. In USD, the total revenues were down about 21% from $783 …

China’s wallet app for its digital yuan central bank digital currency (CBDC) introduced a feature for users to send money in an electronic version of traditional “red packets” to try to attract new users. The new feature was released over the weekend, around one month ahead of the Chinese New Year on Jan. 22, as reported by the South China Morning Post on Dec. 26. The “red packets,” called hongbao in China, are traditionally used for gifting money around the Chinese New Year and other celebrations as a gesture of good luck. The rising use of digital payments has seen …

Major cryptocurrency mining pool BTC.com has suffered a cyberattack resulting in a significant loss of funds by the company and its customers. BTC.com experienced a cyberattack on Dec. 3, with attackers stealing around $700,000 in client assets and $2.3 million in the company’s assets, the mining pool’s parent firm BIT Mining Limited officially announced on Dec. 26. BIT Mining and BTC.com reported the cyberattack to law enforcement authorities in Shenzhen, China. The local authorities subsequently launched an investigation into the incident, starting collecting evidence and requesting assistance from relevant agencies in China. The local coordination has already helped BTC.com recover …

Bitcoin (BTC) maintained $17,000 support into Dec. 10 ahead of a critical week of macro data. CPI print will make Fed "slow down" Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView followed BTC/USD as it traded sideways after the close of trading on Wall Street. The pair looked set for a quiet weekend, with all eyes focused on United States inflation readings and policy updates due from Dec. 13 onward. With the Producer Price Index (PPI) November print behind it, the month’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) results took center stage. As Cointelegraph reported, expectations remain that CPI will show U.S. inflation …

In May 2022, Terraform Labs’ LUNA cryptocurrency and TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin collapsed, triggering a massive shock in the crypto industry. Six months later, the bruised industry took another hammering as one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, filed for bankruptcy protection and billions of dollars of user assets went missing. The FTX empire, once valued at more than $30 billion, fell to zero in fewer than 10 days. FTX reportedly has more than 1 million creditors, most of whom are retail investors who were convinced that FTX would not collapse and had been keeping their assets on the exchange. Taking …

A Chinese court in the city of Hangzhou has said nonfungible token (NFT) collections are online virtual property that should be protected under Chinese law. A Nov. 29 article posted by the Hangzhou Internet Court — a specialist internet court — shared by crypto blogger Wu Blockchain on Dec. 5 reveals the favorable language for NFTs after the country began to crack down on cryptocurrencies in 2021, leaving NFTs in a legal grey area. Translated, the article says NFTs “have the object characteristics of property rights such as value, scarcity, controllability, and tradability” and “belong to network virtual property” that …

Alibaba Cloud, a.k.a Aliyun, a subset of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, announced an integration with Avalanche blockchain to power the company’s Node-as-a-Service initiatives. Avalanche’s partnership with Alibaba Cloud will see the development of tools that enable users to launch validator nodes on Avalanche's public blockchain platform in Asia. The integration will allow Avalanche developers to use Alibaba Cloud’s plug-and-play infrastructure as a service to launch new validators. Developers expecting high resource demands during peak hours can also tap into additional resources — computing, storage, and distribution — offered by Alibaba Cloud. APAC's largest cloud service provider, Alibaba Cloud, has expanded …

Bitcoin (BTC) held crucial $16,000 support into Nov. 29 as bulls weathered ongoing FTX fallout and macro triggers. Trader teases BTC long as $16,500 reappears Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView confirmed BTC/USD leaving lower levels untouched overnight. The pair had seen a flash downturn after the Nov. 27 weekly close thanks to uncertainty from China over Coronavirus measures. A recovery nonetheless took the market higher, with $16,500 coming into play at the time of writing. As Cointelegraph reported, traders and analysts had warned that it was all but essential to preserve current support, with a violation opening up …

China’s COVID-19 protests cemented as NFTs Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) depicting the ongoing protests in China against the country’s tough zero-tolerance COVID-19 policy have found their way to the NFT marketplace OpenSea. At least two collections have been created in November, the first is a Polygon (MATIC)-based collection called “Silent Speech” featuring 135 NFTs depicting images of protesters, signage, graffiti and even social media screenshots related to the ongoing protests up for auction starting at 0.01 Ether (ETH), or just under $11.50. Another collection titled “Blank Paper Movement” of 36 Ethereum-based NFTs with a floor price of 10 ETH, or nearly …

Chinese firms bet on ‘Metaverse-like’ experiences for FIFA World Cup China-based technology companies are reportedly working on tech that would give Chinese soccer fans the ability to watch the FIFA World Cup within the Metaverse. The efforts are part of a five-year plan released by the Chinese government in early November to boost the capabilities and development of the local Virtual Reality (VR) industry. Video streaming platform Migu is one of six Chinese firms that has secured the rights to show the World Cup and plans to create a “Metaverse-like” space accessed through VR headsets for users to watch a …