The Chinese internet giant Baidu doesn’t expect to fully launch its XiRang metaverse app soon despite the app’s initial would debut on Monday, according to a senior executive. Baidu vice president Ma Jie believes that it is still “negative six” years to full XiRang’s launch, CNBC reported on Thursday. He noted that the development of the app started in December 2020. Ma spoke of “Create 2021,” Baidu’s upcoming annual developers’ event, which the company promotes as the first Chinese conference to be hosted in a metaverse space through XiRang. The app will reportedly handle up to 100,000 virtual members interacting …

A global chip shortage is affecting various sectors of industry from gaming to automotive and cryptocurrency mining. Amid Bitcoin's (BTC) ongoing bull run, the crypto mining industry became massively profitable. Many miners started aggressively stacking mining hardware —by sometimes unconventional methods— which led to shortages in other sectors. The COVID-19 fueled surge in gaming consoles, computers and TVs has even had knock-on effects for car manufacturers, who are major consumers of silicon semiconductors. Chip shortages have even led General Motors to shut down three plants and slow production at others. Amid this shortage, Chinese internet giant Baidu is reportedly raising …

China’s Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission (OCCAC) has announced its third round of blockchain projects to receive approval from the country's regulators. 224 distributed ledger technology (DLT) ventures have been added to the commission’s registry, which includes major tech firms Alibaba, Baidu and China Mobile. The news appears to have been broken by Twitter user ‘AliceolaCrypto’, who posted a screenshot of the OCCAC’s announcement on April 27. She wrote that of the 224 approved projects, approximately 40% hail from Beijing. Roughly one-quarter of projects will target the fintech sector. The list of approved projects includes ventures from several …

An engineer at Baidu, China’s equivalent to Google, has been jailed for mining Monero on around 200 of the company’s servers. According to a March 16 report by local media outlet, Abacus News, the employee eventually sold the Monero for around 100,000 yuan ($14,300). Large-scale crypto-jacking Senior engineer, An Bang, was employed by Baidu to maintain its search engine. However, between April and July 2018, he downloaded and installed scripts to mine the cryptocurrency, Monero onto around 200 of the company’s servers. Baidu contacted the police when it noticed unexpected activity levels across many of the servers. By the time …

China’s Bitcoin (BTC) trading volumes have continued to drop, hitting a two-year low on peer-to-peer exchange LocalBitcoins. According to Bitcoin statistics website Coin Dance, China’s BTC trading volumes have been gradually dropping from late 2019 to the present, touching to their lowest weekly volume in more than two years. During the week ending on Jan. 25, China traded just about 4.5 million yuan ($648,000) on LocalBitcoins, down over 90% from the intra-year weekly high of more than 45 million yuan ($6.4 million). The all-time high of China’s weekly Bitcoin trading on LocalBitcoins was hit in January 2018, and accounts for …

Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com has applied for over 200 blockchain patents, according to a report by Securities Daily News on May 20. The report also notes that major e-commerce competitor Alibaba has applied for 262 blockchain patents, and Chinese internet titans Tencent and Baidu have applied for 80 and 50 such patents, respectively, as recorded by the Intellectual Property Center of China Information and Communication. According to interpretation of the data provided by Intellectual Property Center of China Information and Communication, JD.com was in first place for “global blockchain patent strength,” with Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu coming it at second, …

China’s cyberspace administration has released the first list — 197 companies long — of registered blockchain service providers, according to their March 30 notice. Chinese initiatives by internet giants such as Baidu Blockchain Engine, Alibaba Cloud Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS), Tencent BaaS (TBaaS) and the BaaS platform owned by e-commerce giant JD.com appear on the list. Financial institutions such as the China Zheshang Bank and Ping An Insurance Company are also included. Some less-known companies such as blockchain-enabled supply chain management service VeChain and parcel delivery service ParcelX are present on the list as well. The article also notes that no institution …

Chinese search engine and web services company Baidu has launched its Baidu Blockchain Engine (BBE), an operating system designed to facilitate decentralized application (DApp) development. The news was officially announced by Baidu’s cloud computing unit, Baidu Cloud, on Feb. 14. Baidu Cloud states that it considers an open source, commercialized platform to be “the only way to build a blockchain operating system.” BBE has reportedly been built on the basis of Baidu’s “ABC” technology strategy — artificial intelligence (AI), big data and cloud computing — and aims to make DApp development “as simple as creating a mobile app.” Hoping to …

Decentralized Internet project TRON (TRX) and China's largest Internet search provider Baidu will cooperate on cloud computing resources, according to an official tweet from the TRON Foundation posted yesterday, October 17. The tweet confirms a series of unofficial reports that have been circulating since Oct. 13. The first indication that the nature of the Baidu-TRON cooperation would be specifically centered on cloud service provision surfaced earlier this week, in the same report from local news source ODaily that TRON has today retweeted, sealing its official confirmation of the news. ODaily’s text states that Baidu Cloud and TRON have closed a …

The unconfirmed “partnership” between decentralized internet project TRON (TRX) and China's largest internet search provider Baidu will center on cloud computing resources, not blockchain, according to a report published by ODaily October 15. The report, as cited and translated by local crypto news source CNLedger, states that Baidu Cloud and TRON have closed a deal to cooperate in terms of “basic cloud business”; it claims that both parties will work to maximize intercompatibility and “to build, operate and debug blockchain products” based on Baidu Cloud. However, according to the report, the partnership remains focused on the purchase and use of …

Coming every Sunday, the Hodler’s Digest will help you to track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions, and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link. Top Stories This Week CNBC’s Ran Neuner Claims Bitcoin’s Price Is Set To “Explode” Ran Neuner, crypto analyst and host of CNBC’s show Cryptotrader, said this week that the price of Bitcoin is “about to explode.” In a series of tweets, the trader predicted that a notable Bitcoin rally could be tied to the SEC’s upcoming decision …

The team of cryptocurrency project TRON (TRX) has reportedly partnered with China's largest Internet search provider Baidu. Crypto market news service Coinness has claimed this in a tweet Thursday, Oct. 11, citing its private correspondence with TRON’s team. Neither TRON nor Baidu have been able to confirm the partnership to Cointelegraph as of press time. Without specifying the details of the partnership, Coinness has claimed that the deal between TRON and China’s Internet giant Baidu will be “officially” revealed by the cloud storage service Baidu Cloud “next week.” While Coinness claims that TRON has exclusively confirmed the partnership in private …