By Alicia Maher
Even with crypto mining operations prohibited in China, Chinese food company Xiangtai Food has reportedly acquired 686 Bitcoin mining equipment worth around $6M. The mining hardware was bought via Xiangtai’s U.S. subsidiary SonicHash.
According to reports, the newly purchased miners will be delivered around the end of January to the food company’s mining facility in New York. When put together, the number of mines available totals 1,428, and will produce about 132.2 PH/s.
Xiangtai Could Be In For Some Big Troubles
Although the mining equipment bought wouldn’t be used in China, the fact that it was purchased by a Chinese company could bring trouble to the doorpost of Xiangtai.
Last May, China issued a complete ban on all crypto mining operations. This act forced several miners to other countries, notably in Europe and North America and reduced China’s global mining share.
Going by China’s no-nonsense approach towards the crypto industry, Xiangtai could be prosecuted back home for violating a federal law. The food company could argue that the mining equipment isn’t intended to be used in China, which will eventually make a good case. Xiangtai would be lucky to escape the wrath of Chinese authorities.
China Optimistic About The Rollout Of e-CNY
Aside from the fact that mining is energy-intensive and has a negative impact on the environment, the other reason for banning cryptocurrency transactions in the country is to drive the adoption of its digitized currency e-CNY.
China was amongst the first to kickstart a research for CBDC in 2014 when many countries were still novel to Bitcoin and the entire virtual currency market. The country finally completed the development of e-CNY in 2019, and has since been testing it in several sectors of the economy.
The first use case of e-CNY came when the government used it as traveling allowances for its employees. On Wednesday, prominent messaging and payment app WeChat, disclosed that it would integrate digital Yuan payments soon.
China is hoping that the digital Yuan will be ready before the Winter Olympics slated for later this month. The country intends to leverage the famous event to publicize its CBDC and its use cases.
Bitcoin Goes Down Further As Liquidations Hit $174M In Two Hours
Officially, the king of crypto is in the bear market, as all indicators now point to bearishness. The crypto is down further by 1.55%, trading below $42.5k against the USD.
As proof of BTC market decline, crypto liquidations in the last two hours has hit $174M and $900M in the last one day, according to Coinglass. Bitcoin liquidations itself has hit over $500M since Wednesday.
Despite the market bearishness, BTC whales are still clinging to their holdings. Glassnode expects BTC to become bullish if more institutional investors enter the market.