China Financial News

Ethereum Merge, by far the market’s most-anticipated event, will soon take place (potentially in September). As expected, excited ETH supporters remain bullish as it would improve the network’s efficiency and reduce its environmental impact.

As the clash between WazirX and Binance escalates, a senior executive from the latter revealed that WazirX has been avoiding to pass on full ownership of its assets to Binance for the past two years. The global cryptocurrency trading platform will not engage with WazirX in the future, especially with the ongoing Enforcement Directorate (ED) investigation.

It's all going up: electricity, diesel, vegetables, the Internet, hotels, flights, and now, interest rates.

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers are pushing the Federal Reserve to move swiftly toward issuing a digital dollar, to combat steps from China and others they say could one day threaten the US status as the global reserve currency.

Take a look at some of the biggest movers in the premarket:

 

As we approach the Ethereum Merge, the crypto-community’s opinions have been more vocal than usual. The much-awaited ETH 2.0 will change the blockchain’s consensus mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake model, pushing ETH miners out of business. Apart from the chances of them quitting the mining industry, there is a possibility that they opt for a hard fork in the Ethereum network or also try to switch to a different blockchain. 

BEIJING — Chinese tech company Baidu said Monday it has become the first robotaxi operator in China to obtain permits for selling rides with no human driver or staff member inside the vehicles.

U.S. labor productivity is expected to have declined for the second straight quarter as higher compensation costs weigh on the efficiency of the labor force.

HONG KONG—China’s export machine remained surprisingly resilient in July following a strong bounceback from the spring’s harsh Covid-19 restrictions, defying again predictions of softening global demand for Chinese-made goods.

Five cargo ships loaded with grain were due to set sail on Sunday from the Ukrainian ports of Chernomorsk and Odesa to continue exporting grain, the body overseeing the operation said on Saturday evening.

Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House, has come and gone in Taiwan. In her wake have come missile flyovers, enough discussion to briefly crash China’s Twitter -like microblogging service Weibo, the largest Chinese military exercises near the Taiwan Strait in decades—and for those on the island, a surreal sense of life mostly going on.

Taiwan said Saturday that China’s military drills appear to simulate an attack on the self-ruled island, after multiple Chinese warships and aircraft crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei that infuriated Beijing.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has claimed that the company “does not own any equity” in Zanmai Labs, the parent company of Indian crypto-exchange WazirX. This, a day after India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED) froze WazirX’s bank balances worth $8 million earlier.

India freezes assets of Binance-linked WazirX

Geopolitical worries capped the gains for the digital market as US congresswoman Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan which infuriated China. The world's second-largest economy warned of 'targeted' military operations. Top crypto tokens were trading higher on Wednesday.

Ethereum (ETH) miners fearing the worst should the network’s much-vaunted move to proof-of-stake (PoS) go ahead next month could be thrown a lifeline – with Justin Sun and his Poloniex crypto trading platform stating that they will provide support for a proposed proof-of-work fork (PoW) fork.

While domestic digital payment usage surged during the pandemic, the EIU expects this to slow over the next five years, largely owing to strong base effects. However, customers are increasingly demanding a similar revolution in cross-border payments, which are still mostly facilitated by the "old-fashioned" and "cumbersome" correspondent banking network. At the centre of this is Swift, which the paper notes has "encountered criticism for its relative inflexibility and lack of transparency" and seen a decline in the number of correspondent banking relationships over the last decade. More recently, Russian has been kicked off the Swift network, a move which could see the country and others such as China and India double down on their nascent Swift alternatives. Nevertheless, the paper says "setting up and scaling a full-fledged alternative bank-messaging system would be expensive and time consuming. It would also have limited real-world impact, given the prevalence of dollar-denominated cross-border flows. Swift will remain the dominant network, as long as countries and lenders come together to improve the Belgian network." Separately, cross-border payments will be disrupted by government-backed efforts to link systems. In Asia, moves are already underway to do this, allowing travellers across the region to purchase goods and services by scanning QR codes. As well as challenging Swift, disrupting cross-border payments will mean adopting emerging technologies, including blockchain, APIs and tokenisation, says the EIU.

China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the EU criticising Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan.

BEIJING — Data show that Taiwan depends more on China for trade than it does on the U.S., even if U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi threw her weight behind Taiwan this week in a high-profile visit.

Bitcoin firm above the $23,000 mark. The crypto market was unfazed by Solana attacks, which drained wealth out of 8,000 wallets. Markets digested US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan on August 2, 2022, which caused many investors to stay away from risky assets amid potential US-China tensions.