Xiao Yi, the previous secretary of the Fuzhou Metropolis Communist Get together, pleaded responsible to corruption costs within the Zhejiang Hangzhou Intermediate Folks’s Courtroom, in accordance with a report printed by the state-run each day Xinwen Lianbo on December 29. Throughout his tenure as director from 2008 to 2021, Yi was accused of accepting over 125 million Chinese language yuan ($18 million) in bribes associated to development packages and unlawful promotions.

Along with the above costs, Yi additionally pleaded responsible to costs associated to enterprise transactions between him and Bitcoin (BTC) miners from 2017 to 2021. It’s unclear whether or not the sequence of costs have been associated. As reported by Xinwen Lianbo:

“Throughout his tenure from 2017 to 2021 as Fuzhou Metropolis Communist Get together Secretary, Xiao Yi supported cryptocurrency mining firms within the type of subsidies, capital grants and electrical energy insurance coverage. These actions went towards nationwide laws, redevelopment idea, and resulted in large public property losses, resulting in adversarial penalties.”

The court docket has been adjourned and can sentence Yi on the upcoming session.

Citing the necessity to meet “carbon neutrality” targets and “high vitality prices,” the Chinese language authorities banned all cryptocurrency mining actions on September 24, 2021. The laws blocks cryptocurrency miners from accessing energy and capital markets and features a common ban on investments.

Nevertheless, it seems to have been troublesome to implement the ban, partly because of the decentralized and peer-to-peer nature of crypto mining. In Could 2022, Cointelegraph reported that regardless of the ban, China has returned because the world’s second largest Bitcoin mining hub. The laws itself additionally permits native authorities to levy a cryptocurrency mining tariff of 0.30 yuan ($0.0431) per kilowatt-hour of electrical energy consumed as a substitute for energy cuts within the occasion of detection.

Chinese language crypto miners have proven resilience regardless of a nationwide crackdown. Supply: Cambridge Bitcoin Electrical energy Consumption Index