China 'Airdrops' Millions To Citizens

GM Readers!📪 It's BitDegree Insider, and it's time to see what's up.

⭐️Today's selection:

• 🐲China's $26.5 Million 'Crypto Yuan' Airdrop
• 🐵Bored Apes Yacht Club Wins A Lawsuit
• 😎Cool Fact Tuesday
• 👌Selected Meme of The Day
• 📰Bite-Sized News

CHINA AIRDROPS DIGITAL YUAN

China gave its citizens ¥180 million ($26.6 million) worth of "crypto yuan" during the holiday festivities.

The digital currency in question is e-CNY, which is being actively promoted by the government. It's a CBDC, a Central Bank Digital Currency.

So, for the Lunar New Year and Spring Festival, local governments launched more than 200 promotions using e-CNY.

These included coupons for food delivery and shopping, subsidies and cultural events.

Businesses also participated in the events - they received donations for development, advertising, etc. 

In the city of Shenzhen, the authorities gave away coupons so citizens could pay at cafes and restaurants.

In total, Shenzhen residents received vouchers worth $14.7 million. And each resident of Hangzhou province was given a certificate worth ¥80 ($12).

In the city of Tianjin, paying in E-CNY could get a 50% discount on a movie screening, going to a restaurant or shopping at some shops.

The digital yuan has recently been introduced in securities trading. And Alipay has added the currency to its payment methods.

The Suzhou city authorities have recently rolled out a crazy plan to accelerate the adoption of the digital yuan - the city plans to make $300 billion worth of transactions in CBDC this year.  

Just take a second look at that number again. They're talking about some colossal proportions.

Last month, the e-CNY transfer wallet was updated - you can now transfer yuan even if you don't have internet on your smartphone (for now, the feature is only available on Android).

It sounds scary, but CBDC's forced mass adoption in China is starting to gain speed. Supersonic speed, almost.

This success is generating interest from the country's big neighbours. 

The future is here, and it definitely looks frightening.

TL;DR: China's mass adoption of digital yuan is gaining speed. The country gave its citizens ¥180 million ($26.6 million) worth of 'crypto yuan' during the holiday festivities. More measures will be implemented to accelerate the process in the near future.

BORED APES (YUGA LABS) WINS A LAWSUIT AGAINST A 'PLAGIARISER'

Not long ago, studio Yuga Labs filed a lawsuit against blockchain Thomas Lehman, a programmer.

They accused him of working on the RR/BAYC project. It is a collection of 10,000 NFTs that have similar names and styles to the original "monkeys".

Lehman, allegedly, helped create a smart contract for this collection. The RR/ BAYC project ended up earning $1.6m on sales of the collection and Lehman received 15%

At trial, the parties reached a settlement agreement.

Lehman ceded ownership of the BAYC trademark to Yuga Labs and acknowledged that he had infringed copyright by his participation in RR/BAYC.

The terms of the settlement agreement prohibited him from using any BAYC trademark, from destroying any materials in his possession containing the mark, and from burning any NFT collections of RR/BAYC that he owns.

The documents do not disclose whether the examiner will pay any financial penalties.

The settlement agreement is one of Yuga Labs' victories in a long-running lawsuit against artist Ryder Ripps, author of the RR/BAYC project.

Ripps launched the art token collection after accusations of "cryptofascism" by BAYC.

For more context, blogger Philip Rusnak claimed that the "bored apes" contain racist or extreme right-wing symbolism.

As a parody of the whole scandal, Ripps has created those ironic NFTs. But, since it ignited the time-consuming court drama, there's little humour left in the whole thing.

TL;DR: 

Yuga Labs, the creators of the BAYC NFT collection, won a case against Thomas Lehman, a programmer who helped Ryder Ripps, an author of a 'satyric' bootleg version of the BAYC collection called RR/BAYC, to make this project happen.

COOL FACT TUESDAY

It's Tuesday, and Tuesdays are for cool stories. But today let's go with something more mysterious.

So, recently, Tether (USDT) has blocked yet another crypto address. But this one's different. It had 5,000,000 USDT stored in it.

This is the 820th address that has been blocked since 2017 by Tether.

And if that was not enough, Tether is being exploited by a new type of scammers.

These scammers started sending out seed phrases to random people. It gave them access to a malicious wallet.

When they entered it, this is what they saw:

Looks normal, right?

No, it's not normal. What you're seeing here is... USDT balance awaiting to be withdrawn.

It makes you think that if you deposited TRX (Tron), you could withdraw these 'free' USDT.

So, naturally, people fell for it.

It didn't work out. They still couldn't withdraw. Why?

Because, in the TRON network, the wallet management can be re-linked! People were just sending commissions to a zombie wallet, to which they had access, but no actual control.

Some people sent out amounts as big as $200 right away, because it felt like a real deal.

Of course, it wasn't! There is no such thing as free lunch.

SELECTED MEME OF THE DAY

BITE-SIZED NEWS

• Crypto Exchange Binance to Temporarily Halt All USD Bank Transfers. It begins on February 8th.
• DEX Community Agrees to Deploy Uniswap v3 on Boba Network. Democracy intensifies.
• FTX to Recover Sam Bankman-Fried's Political Donations by The End of February. Well, it looks like not everything's lost.