Holiday Bitcoin sell-off, $3 million Binance Smart Chain heists - Blockheads - Android

A drop in crypto prices is expected before Spring Festival as Chinese miners cash out. Five projects disappear from Binance Smart Chain, taking $3 million.

Pre-holiday sell-off

Bitcoin prices will continue to face selling pressure over the next two weeks as Chinese miners sell their tokens in the run up to the Spring Festival holiday, according to a report published Thursday from Singapore-based Stack Funds, a cryptocurrency investment management company.

In the last four years, Bitcoin prices have consistently fallen during China’s week-long holiday. In 2018, they fell by 50%. The weeklong holiday, which this year will falls on Feb. 11 to 17, calls for increased spending on gifts and traveling, which has the world’s largest cryptocurrency mining community selling their tokens for fiat currency, industry observers have said. (Cointelegraph)

Binance Smart Chain thefts

Several projects have reportedly raised money on Binance Smart Chain, the cryptocurrency exchange’s developer platform which focuses on decentralized finance (DeFi). Organizers behind some of these projects have raised funds from users wanting to participate in the project, and then disappeared, taking the funds with them.

Three of the five projects that have fled the Binance developer platform took BNB 59,000, the platforms’ native token, worth close to $3 million. (Wu Blockchain, in Chinese)

Interoperability news

• The Blockchain Services Network (BSN), an “internet of blockchains” spearheaded by the Chinese government, launched the Open Permissioned Project, an attempt to integrate public chains into the network while making them compliant with Chinese regulations. The development team behind IRISNet developed Bianjie, the first blockchain launched under the project. (BSN official Medium account)
• Poly Network launched interoperability between its member chains and Zilliqa, an enterprise-oriented chain developed by a team in Singapore. (Poly Network official Medium account)

Mining updates

• Canaan Creative signed a contract to sell 6,000 of its latest cryptocurrency mining machines to US-based Core Scientific, just weeks after it agreed to sell 6,400 of the same model, the Avalonminer 1246, to Canadian mine operator Hive Blockchain. Canaan’s losses in the third quarter of 2020 increased by a factor of four to $12 million, after it lowered its price for computing power by almost 70% year on year in a bid to boost sales. The effort appeared to have backfired—revenue during the quarter fell 76% compared with the same quarter a year ago, while computing power sales for the period dropped 21% year on year. (Canaan Creative website, in Chinese)
• Bitmain’s Wu Jihan started the handover to Zhan Ketuan on Jan. 26, ending a year-long battle for control between the two co-founders of the world’s largest cryptocurrency mining equipment manufacturer. The official WeChat account for Antminer, its flagship product, posted a notice saying product deliveries won’t be affected by the changes in management. (Antminer official WeChat)
• On Jan. 31, one of five directors at Bitmain quit for unknown reasons. (Wu Blockchain Twitter)
• Ebang’s executive director Wang Hongyong said at a roundtable meeting that he expects 500,000 to 800,000 total shipments of cryptocurrency mining machines in 2021. (Wu Blockchain Twitter)

The US take on DCEP

China’s digital yuan “poses serious risks to US national security interests,” according to a report by the Center for New American Security. The digital currency is an attempt to enhance and export Beijing’s “digital authoritarianism” through the collection of financial data and the application of AI and big data on these databases.

The digital yuan could also risk US citizens’ privacy and internationalize the renmimbi yuan at the US dollar’s expense, the report said.

(Center for New American Security)

READ MORE: INSIGHTS | China’s digital currency has a long way to go

Staff change

• 100x, the group behind Seychelles-based crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX appointed the former Bank of China chief credit officer, Wai Kin Chim, to its board of directors. (BitMEX press release)