China’s e-yuan will be accepted at all venues at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games
China is ready to showcase its state digital currency, the e-CNY, as an official payment method at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, which kicks off on Friday.
According to a statement from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), all payment services related to the Olympics have been prepared, including accounts, bank cards, mobile payments, cash, and the digital yuan.
The e-CNY is China’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), which is essentially a clone of the fiat yuan in the form of a digital asset. Unlike decentralized cryptocurrencies, which are banned in China, the e-CNY is fully controlled and governed by the central bank.
The e-CNY is already accepted at the Beijing Olympics’ official store in the Main Media Center (MMC), which officially began 24-hour operations on Monday.
The Olympics will be part of a gradual e-CNY rollout, which has already been test-launched in five major Chinese cities, including Shanghai and Shenzhen. On January 4, the PBOC also launched the e-CNY wallet on the iOS and Android app stores countrywide. By mid-January, the e-CNY wallets had nearly 261 million individual users, roughly one-fifth of the entire Chinese population, with e-CNY apps ranking as the fastest-growing by downloads in the country.
However, the e-CNY is still in pilot mode. Although the wallet is available for download across the entire country, only users from the five pilot cities and the Olympics venue can sign up and actually use the digital currency. For now, the e-CNY can only be used for a limited number of transactions.
The fast-growing decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has been increasingly targeted by cyber criminals
One of the most popular bridges linking the Ethereum and Solana blockchains became a victim of a hack attack on Wednesday resulting in a crypto theft worth more than $320 million.
Developers representing Wormhole confirmed the exploit on its Twitter account, saying the network bridge is currently down while the team investigates a potential exploit. The official website says that the portal is temporarily unavailable.
Wormhole is a protocol that lets users move their tokens and NFTs between Solana and Ethereum. Crypto holders often do not operate exclusively within one blockchain ecosystem, so developers have built cross-chain bridges to let users send their digital assets from one chain to another.
It is DeFi’s second-biggest exploit ever, and the largest attack to date on Solana, which is increasingly gaining traction in the non-fungible token (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems.
“The $320 million hack on Wormhole Bridge highlights the growing trend of attacks against blockchains protocols,” blockchain cybersecurity firm CertiK co-founder Ronghui Gu was quoted as saying by CNBC. “This attack is sounding the alarms of growing concern around security on the blockchain.”
Meanwhile, the founder of Solana DeFi platform Step Finance, George Harrap, told CoinDesk he expects Jump Capital, which purchased Wormhole developer Certus One, to step in to backstop the hacked ETH. Otherwise, he said, a number of Solana-based platforms that accept ETH as collateral may now be partially insolvent.
“If nobody backs it and the coins are truly gone then Wormhole ETH is worth 0 and everyone who has a balance of it becomes worthless, DeFi protocols, users, everyone,” Harrap said.
Cryptocurrency platforms have suffered a number of high-value hacks in recent years. In August, Poly Network was hit by a major attack that saw the hacker steal more than $600 million worth of tokens. The theft was thought to be the biggest crypto heist ever, surpassing the $534.8 million stolen from Japanese digital currency exchange Coincheck in 2018 and the estimated $450 million worth of Bitcoin that went missing from Tokyo-based Mt. Gox in 2014.
Poly Network’s hacker, however, gave back nearly all of the money, with the exception of $33 million of Tether that was frozen by its issuers.
People may have to pay twice as much for gas and electricity after the regulator lifts the cap on energy bills
The UK’s Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) is lifting the price cap for domestic energy bills by 54%, the regulator said in a press release on Thursday.
“The energy price cap will increase from 1 April for approximately 22 million customers. Those on default tariffs paying by direct debit will see an increase of £693 from £1,277 to £1,971 ($2,670) per year,” the press release reads.
The energy price cap sets a maximum amount energy suppliers can charge customers for the gas and electricity they use. According to Ofgem, the cap “stops energy companies from making excessive profits, ensuring customers pay no more than a fair price for their energy.”
Ofgem sets the cap every six months based on the underlying costs to supply energy, with the previous rise in October hiking energy bills by 12% to an all-time high of £1,277 ($1,731) a year for around 15 million households.
Ofgem says the latest cap hike is made in response to a “record rise in global gas prices over the last 6 months, with wholesale prices quadrupling in the last year” and resulting in closures of dozens of utilities.
“Over the last year, 29 energy companies have exited the market or been put in special administration in the wake of soaring global gas prices, affecting around 4.3 million domestic customers,” the regulator states. Ofgem expects the cap lift to affect default tariff customers, who haven’t yet switched to a fixed deal on energy consumption.
“This is because energy companies cannot afford to supply electricity and gas to their customers for less than they have paid for it,” the press release says. The regulator, however, noted that it is preparing other measures in order to tackle the worsening energy crisis, including changing the frequency of price cap updates “to ensure that it still reflects the true cost of supplying energy.”
UK consumers are already suffering from soaring prices on everything from energy to consumer goods as inflation races toward its fastest pace in three decades. Ofgem’s announcement also came mere hours before the Bank of England revealed a new interest-rate hike of 0.5%.
On the bright side, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak has just announced a package to help households pay their power bills, which will provide £350 ($476) to the “vast majority of households” to offset Ofgem’s cap hike. However, many experts say this will only cushion the impact, with social media users already dubbing Ofgem’s cap move “black Thursday.”
The case is one of several triggered by the CEO’s prolific tweeting
A lawyer for Tesla told a US appeals court on Wednesday that a 2018 tweet by chief executive Elon Musk suggesting factory workers would lose stock options if they unionized was not an unlawful threat, because it simply reflected the position of the union.
The tweet came amid the United Auto Workers (UAW) union’s years-long campaign to organize workers at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California. It said: “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues and give up stock options for nothing?”
Two days after the initial tweet, Musk said in a separate Twitter thread that it was the UAW, and not the company, that opposed stock options.
In March, Tesla appealed an order by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Musk delete the tweet. According to a judge, the labor board wasn’t “completely out of line,” as Musk’s tweet could be interpreted as a message that “the price you will have to pay if you unionize is you’ll give up your stock options.”
Tesla attorney David Salmons told the hearing on Wednesday that the constitutional right to free speech under the First Amendment “protects an employer’s robust speech about the downsides to unionization.” Taken in context, the tweet is really a “statement about what the union, not the company, will or will not do,” he said.
Meanwhile, a lawyer representing UAW, Daniel Curry, argued to the panel that Musk’s tweet was “a threat of retaliation, not a lawful expression of opinion.” The subsequent message only sowed further confusion, Curry said, adding: “The idea they’re putting out there that a union could take away an employee’s stock options just doesn’t fit with reality.”
Curry also pointed out that Musk’s history of making major announcements and controversial statements on social media would reasonably lead Tesla workers to take him at his word. “That is how Musk uses Twitter. Just like a press release,” he said.
Musk has a long history of controversial tweets, which has led to lawsuits. Tesla is facing a suit from investors over another 2018 post by the CEO, in which he said funding was secured to take the company private. In another case, a British cave explorer unsuccessfully sued Musk for calling him a “pedo guy” on Twitter.
The company lost over a quarter of market value amid the shares’ drop, dragging down other tech stocks
Meta (formerly Facebook) shares dropped around 26% at the opening of trading on Thursday after Facebook’s quarterly report missed earnings expectations. The report also revealed that the number of the social media platform’s global daily active users declined from the previous quarter for the first time on record, to 1.929 billion from 1.93 billion.
Amid the nosedive, the company’s market value plunged by $240 billion to about $660 billion.
Meta blamed Apple and TikTok for Facebook’s poor performance, claiming Apple’s privacy changes to its operating system made it difficult for brands to use advertising mechanisms on Facebook and Instagram.
The report also cited macroeconomic issues like supply chain disruptions as one of the reasons behind low fourth quarter earnings, while in his conversation with investors, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg complained that Facebook is facing growing competition from rivals like TikTok.
Statistics show that at its current level, Meta’s drop is the largest single-day collapse in US market history.
Moreover, the Meta plunge has triggered a sell-off on the tech-oriented Nasdaq composite index, with S&P 500 shedding 1.6%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.8% as of 17:00 GMT. Twitter, Snap, Spotify, and a number of other social media companies were among the stocks which also lost value following Meta’s drop.
Thursday’s stock crash could wipe out around $24 billion, or nearly 20%, of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The drop in Zuckerberg’s wealth from $120 billion to $97 billion would rank among the biggest ever, only rivaled by Tesla co-founder Elon Musk’s fortune swings. Musk lost $35 billion in one day in November last year when Tesla stock dropped after Musk’s Twitter poll on the sale of Tesla shares.
