This weekly roundup of news from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong attempts to curate the industry’s most important news, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations.
Bad news for Evergrande
Even after all the regulatory crackdowns, China isn’t letting 2021 slip away without a few more blows to the crypto markets. On December 9, the news revealed that massive real estate developer Evergrande had defaulted on its interest payments, and was thus subject to a credit rating downgrade.
Subsequently, crypto markets dipped significantly, which will be worrying to investors who are already mumbling about jobless rates and new COVID variants. On the bright side, if the situation with Evergrande goes from bad to worse, financial regulators are going to have their hands full, giving them less time to focus on stamping out cryptocurrency as we approach the final month and a half of the lunar calendar.
Bitmart bouncing back
Bitmart was the unfortunate victim of a large hack on December 5, when $150m was taken from an Ethereum and BSC hot wallet. CEO Sheldon Xia quickly jumped on Twitter and announced that the hot wallets carry only a small portion of the assets on Bitmart and that the exchange was conducting a comprehensive security review.
1/4 In response to this incident, BitMart has completed initial security checks and identified affected assets. This security breach was mainly caused by a stolen private key that had two of our hot wallets compromised. Other assets with BitMart are safe and unharmed.
— Sheldon Xia (@sheldonbitmart) December 6, 2021
While many Tier 2 exchanges might have been slow to react, to Bitmart’s credit, it communicated very frequently throughout. The following day, Xia returned to Twitter to announce that Bitmart’s other assets were secure and that the exchange would compensate affected users from its own funds. For an established exchange, this amount of loss wouldn’t be too crippling, especially if remaining…
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