Digital yuan for business, Filecoin double spend: Blockheads

The digital yuan

• Bank of China in Beijing has started accepting applications for enterprise digital yuan accounts, while China Construction Bank in Suzhou is opening merchant accounts using China’s state-backed digital currency. Enterprise accounts will significantly widen the e-CNY’s use cases. (TechNode)
• The director of the central bank’s digital currency research institute, Mu Changchun, gave details about controllable anonymity in the e-CNY, a term officials have used to explain the digital currency’s privacy features. The digital yuan wallet will open an encrypted sub-wallet that will connect to e-commerce platforms when shopping online, such that the user’s bank card information and other personal data cannot be accessed by the platform. (STCN, in Chinese)

Filecoin accounting problem

Binance processed a $4.6 million double deposit of Filecoin, the token of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) decentralized file storage system. The initiator of the transaction tried to speed up a transaction by issuing a call for a replace-by-fee transaction, essentially asking a miner to confirm the transaction for a higher fee. The system would have normally ignored the first transaction, but it didn’t. This led to the initiators’ money doubling, from 61,000 Filecoin to 120,000. (CoinDesk)

Binance blamed a bug in Filecoin’s code. Filecoin said that the exchange was not using its API correctly. (Filecoin official blog)

Crypto crimes

• China’s Supreme Court and the People’s Bank of China jointly wrote about six examples of money laundering, including one that involved Bitcoin. Chen Moubo and his ex-wife Chen Mouzhi used the cryptocurrency in 2019 to launder RMB 900,000 ($138,233). Chen Mouzhi was jailed for two years and fined RMB 200,000. The government is reportedly working to update money laundering laws. (Southeast Network, in Chinese)
• Police in Turkey raided a crypto scam operation run by Chinese nationals who held 101 employees captive on the site. (TechNode)

The exchanges

• Huobi and Binance, two of China’s top exchanges, quietly increased transaction fees for a version of stablecoin Tether, one of China’s most popular cryptocurrencies, issued on the TRON network. (Wu Blockchain, in Chinese)
• Huobi reportedly consolidated all of its operations under the leadership of Du Jun, who was at the exchange’s helm while the CEO Leon Li was missing in action as he was cooperating with Chinese authorities in an investigation. Li only returned to work earlier in March. (Wu Blockchain)

A second Binance heist

Another decentralized finance project on Binance Smart Chain, the cryptocurrency exchange’s DeFi oriented blockchain, disappeared with an estimated 9,000 BNB coins ($2.34 million at the time of writing). The project, dubbed TurtleDex, claimed to be a decentralized file storage solution. (Binance Smart Chain announcement)

READ MORE: Holiday Bitcoin sell-off, $3 million Binance Smart Chain heists

Another Meitu crypto purchase

Meitu announced it will buy close to $50 million in Bitcoin and Ether, just weeks after it announced a $40 million purchase. (Meitu filing)

Some of these [Bitcoin’s] features potentially even render Bitcoin as a superior form to other alternative stores of value such as gold, precious stone and real estate.

—Meitu in its filing about its second cryptocurrency purchase

Blockchain labor

The number of posted jobs in China for blockchain developers decreased 45% year on year in November, an analysis of job postings by blockchain market research firm Zero One found. Average salaries in the country have dropped 1.5% to RMB 22,300 ($3,400) although they remain significantly higher than China’s average monthly pay. Small companies with staff numbering between 50 and 149 people made up the biggest slice of China’s blockchain companies, accounting for 35.3% of the sector, followed by giants with 500 to 4,999 employees, which made up 22.9%. (Zero One, in Chinese)

6nm chips

Cryptocurrency rig maker Ebang announced it completed the design of its first 6-nanometer ASIC chips for Bitcoin mining. Ebang stock rose 4.5% on the back of the announcement.(Ebang press release)

The NFTs

• Bart Baker, an American social media influencer with millions of fans on Douyin, will release a series of non-fungible tokens (NFT), a type of crypto collectible, on DefineArt, a new NFT exchange that is targeting Asian investors. (CoinTelegraph)

READ MORE: CHINA VOICES | What China thinks of NFTs