Chinese billionaire and Alibaba founder Jack Ma will no longer control the fintech giant Ant Group as part of recent changes to the company’s corporate structure. Ant Group officially announced that Ma has agreed to give up control of Ant Group as part of the company’s further corporate governance optimization and restructuring. Prior to the change, Ma was the control person in Ant, exercising control over the company through related entities in addition to his 10% stake in Ant. Once the restructuring process is complete, no single shareholder will have control over Ant, the company said in a statement. Major …

Chinese multinational e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding has launched a new nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace allowing trademark holders to sell tokenized licenses to their intellectual property. The new NFT marketplace, dubbed “Blockchain Digital Copyright and Asset-Trade,” can be accessed via Alibaba’s Auction platform. NFTs launched via the platform will be issued on the “New Copyright Blockchain” — a distributed ledger technology platform centrally operated by the Sichuan Blockchain Association Copyright Committee. According to a Tuesday report from Alibaba-owned news publication South China Morning Post (SCMP), the marketplace hopes to target writers, musicians, artists and game developers. The marketplace is already …

Major Chinese technology and commerce firms are starting to open up regarding their involvement in developing the digital yuan. Ant Group and Tencent Holdings revealed the extent of their collaboration with the People’s Bank of China in developing the digital yuan at the Digital China Summit, an annual trade fair in the city of Fuzhou in southeastern Fujian province. According to the South China Morning Post, Ant Group started working with the PBoC on the digital yuan in 2017, years before China officially debuted digital currency pilots in 2020. In June 2019, China’s digital currency institute reportedly used Ant’s mobile …

For the past several years, the trade war between China and the U.S. has been at the center of international relations, with technology playing an outsized role. Within crypto, advancing interest in central bank digital currencies has become part of that narrative of geopolitical competition. Many have framed the development of CBDCs in China and the U.S. as a race — in which case, China is clearly closer to launch and, hence, the “winner.” But a race to the finish is a flawed paradigm, and one to which Cointelegraph has contributed its fair share. For the moment, China is actively …

China’s central bank is pushing exposure to its ongoing national digital currency pilot by enlisting two major private banks in the project. According to a Monday Bloomberg report, MYbank and WeBank will help the People's Bank of China extend its user exposure in the ongoing pilots of its central bank digital currency, the digital yuan. As part of the integration, MYbank’s service will soon be introduced to the PBoC’s digital yuan app, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. The e-wallets by MYbank and WeBank will reportedly have exactly the same functions as those from the six state-owned lenders in …

Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor's note As they say, the sun never sets on the Google empire. That said, the role of antitrust law in tech has been on the rise in recent years. Every indication is that the situation is only going to get worse for mega tech firms. So Jeff Bezos’ departure from the top spot at Amazon may well have been a beautifully timed case of quitting while you’re ahead. As I’ve mentioned before — “harped on about” might actually be more …

Ant Group, the financial affiliate of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba, has reportedly reached an agreement with Chinese regulators over the company's status. According to a Feb. 3 report by Bloomberg, Chinese regulators have agreed on a restructuring plan that will turn Jack Ma’s fintech giant into a financial holding company. Ant Group’s new status will reportedly make it subject to capital requirements similar to those for Chinese banks. The agreement will impact a wide scope of Ant’s business operations, including its technology offerings in areas like blockchain and food delivery, unnamed sources told Bloomberg. According to the report, the restructuring …

Jack Ma, the founder of Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba, has made his first public appearance since October, bringing almost three months of intense speculation about his possible whereabouts to a close. In a new video clip published online on Jan. 20, Ma was reportedly shown visiting a school rebuilt by his foundation — a glimpse that was enough to spur Alibaba's Hong Kong-traded shares to rise by almost 9%. Investors' momentary reassurance follows months of inscrutable actions from the Chinese state to reassert control over one of the country's wealthiest figures, whose conglomerate provides over 70% of China's citizens with …

With just two weeks left in office, President Donald Trump has sent out a new executive order targeting Chinese payment apps. The Tuesday order bars United States citizens or people located in the U.S. from using nine Chinese payment apps. It continues the White House's earlier efforts to cut off the U.S. market from Chinese-owned apps like TikTok. Yesterday's order repeats earlier concerns of data collection by the Chinese Communist Party: "The continuing activity of the PRC and the CCP to steal or otherwise obtain United States persons’ data makes clear that there is an intent to use bulk data …

Jack Ma, the now-retired founder of Alibaba Group, recently spoke to a crowd of bankers and regulators at the Bund Summit in Shanghai about the role digital currencies will likely play in the future global financial system: “Digital currency could create value and we should think about how to establish a new type of financial system through digital currency.” He opined that the current financial system governed by Basel Accords is too conservative and does not fit China’s growing economy: “After the Asian financial crisis, the risk control highlighted in the Basel Accords has been only focused on risk control, …

Ant Group, the financial affiliate of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba, has filed an Initial Public Offering, or IPO, in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Created by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, Ant Group is targeting a valuation of about $226 billion, based on a target IPO raise of nearly $30 billion, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg on Aug. 25. As reported, the new IPO could become the largest deal in history, potentially overtaking the record set by Saudi Arabian multinational oil and gas giant, Saudi Aramco — which raised around $29.4B earlier this year. According to Bloomberg data, the target …

Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma is stepping down from the board of Japanese tech giant and major blockchain backer SoftBank. After 13 years of close involvement with SoftBank, China’s richest man leaves the board amid SoftBank posting its worst operating losses in its history. According to a May 17 report by Japanese publication Nikkei, Ma’s departure announcement amid Softbank’s Vision Fund reporting record-breaking losses of 1.8 trillion yen ($16.7 billion). Softbank’s total annual losses accounted for 1.36 trillion yen ($12.7 billion) for the year ending March 31, the company reported. China’s richest man to leave Softbank’s board on June 25 Announcing …