PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, has warned that the Chinese central government may be supporting Bitcoin as a means to undermine the foreign and monetary policy of the United States. But, he added, it has tried to use the Euro the same way. Speaking at a virtual event hosted by conservative non-profit, the Richard Nixon Foundation, Thiel was commenting on whether China’s central bank-issued digital currency, or CBDC, could threaten the U.S. dollar’s status as a global reserve currency. While Thiel, who is known to be pro-Bitcoin, suggested an “internal stablecoin in China” will amount to little more …

United Kingdom-based Bitcoin (BTC) mining firm Argo Blockchain just recorded the best quarter in its history, generating record revenues for three months straight. Yet despite the burgeoning cryptocurrency mining venture emerging in the west, the vast majority of Bitcoin production still takes place in China, where cheap, coal-powered electricity fuels an untold number of mining rigs. A recent report by Nature.com revealed that as much as 75% of Bitcoin mining takes place in China — news which must fall hard on the ears of Shark Tank and Dragon’s Den investor Kevin O’Leary, who recently labeled all Bitcoin mined with the …

Ebang, a publicly listed company providing mining hardware for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC), has officially announced the launch of its own crypto exchange. According to an announcement on Monday, qualified investors will be soon able to register and trade on Ebang’s cryptocurrency exchange dubbed Ebonex. Ebang CEO and chairman Dong Hu said: “In recent years, we have made a considerable investment in R&D talent recruiting, as well as product innovation and iteration. The launch of our cryptocurrency exchange business will not only expand the revenue sources from our cryptocurrency business but also optimize the development of our blockchain industry chain.” …

The cryptocurrency space may be helping to spawn its own competitors after a representative of the People’s Bank of China said Bitcoin’s (BTC) recent surge had caused renewed interest in the nation’s digital yuan project. The digital yuan is China’s central bank digital currency, and like all CBDCs its foundational principles are completely antithetical to those of the cryptocurrency space. Core crypto concepts of decentralization and autonomy are dispensed with in favor of centralization and oversight, in an effort by government authorities to more easily control the flow of money. The digital yuan is also expected to be central to …

Distributed storage network project Filecoin is the talk of the town as FIL was the most highly traded token on Huobi, OKEx and Gate on Thursday. These three exchanges have a predominantly Chinese user base and represent a large part of the Tier One trading volume for major pairs. On Thursday afternoon, Huobi trading volumes of FIL were more than three times that of BTC as the price reached a 7-day increase of 170%. Filecoin has had strong success in capturing the attention of Chinese investors, including large investment groups such as Fenbushi Capital, SNZ Capital and Neo’s EcoFund. These …

The crypto market continues to search for scaling solutions as decentralized finance (DeFi) applications struggle with surging fees, but some alternative solutions are piquing investors' interest. For example, Nervos Network has enticed investors' appetites with a 341% rally in a month. The project also carries the Chinese government's stamp of approval, further increasing the odds for this project's future relevance. Nervos Network is a blockchain project based in China that supports layer-two scaling solutions. Since its inception, the project has sought to target decentralized finance (DeFi) and asset tokenization. The Nervos Common Knowledge Base (CKB) network provides a Turing-complete virtual …

China has completed its first cross-border pilots of the digital yuan with Hong Kong. Wang Xin, director of the People’s Bank of China research bureau, said that the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the PBoC have conducted technical tests on the cross-border use of China’s central bank digital currency. The official announced the news at a Thursday press conference hosted by the State Council Information Office of China, local news agency Sina Finance reports. The news comes shortly after Mu Changchun, head of the PBoC's digital currency research institute, proposed a set of global CBDC rules last week. Speaking at …

Red Date Technology, one of the builders of China’s Blockchain-based Service Network, has obtained licensing rights from R3 to resell both the free and enterprise Corda implementations in China. According to a press release by R3, the news marks the first occasion of the BSN developer being able to resell enterprise blockchain technology from an overseas company. Since the R3 deal is with BSN China, developers will create a permissioned version of Corda to comply with Chinese blockchain regulations. Also, with banks reportedly being one of the likely users of the network, the country’s UnionPay cloud infrastructure will play host …

Coin Metrics co-founder Nic Carter has produced a well-researched rebuttal to some of the key claims suggesting power-hungry Bitcoin mining is causing an environmental disaster. In an in-depth article called Noahbjectivity on Bitcoin mining penned on March 30, the Castle Island Ventures Partner responds to claims by Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith in a March 24 article titled Bitcoin miners are on a path to self-destruction. The first claim Carter took aim at was that Bitcoin is unique among assets in that a rising price entails a greater energy draw. Carter stated that gold has the exact same trait in that …

Soros Fund Management chief information officer Dawn Fitzpatrick said Bitcoin (BTC) may once have been considered a fringe asset, but the inflation of the United States dollar has changed that. Speaking to Bloomberg, Fitzpatrick said her firm — an asset management fund created by global investor George Soros — had recently begun to take an interest in Bitcoin. “We think the whole infrastructure around crypto is really interesting, and we’ve been making some investments into that infrastructure — and we think that is at an inflection point,” said Fitzpatrick. That inflection point is coming as a result of fiat inflation, …

China’s central bank digital currency, or CBDC, will provide backup for major retail payment services like AliPay and WeChat Pay as its key objective, according to an official at the People’s Bank of China. Mu Changchun, head of the People’s Bank of China’s digital currency research institute, claimed that China’s digital yuan is needed to ensure financial stability in case “something happens” to AliPay or WeChat Pay, the South China Morning Post reports. Speaking at an online panel discussion on Thursday, Mu stated that Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay account for 98% of the mobile payment market in China, …

Sentiment in China has slumped as WeChat searches for Bitcoin dropped 7% this week, while searches for “bear market” spiked 102%. One trend that remained strong was NFT-related, with NFTs receiving an 86% increase in WeChat searches over the seven-day period. Token sales were another hot item with interest in Casper Labs surging after signups on CoinList breached 100,000 on global platforms. One high-profile token sale to emerge from China was DAO-as-a-Service platform Dora Factory. The project, backed by DoraHacks, held a public token launch on March 21 with listings on OKEx, Gate and MXC. DoraHacks is well-known for hosting …