According to one insider, Chinese police are after Web3 co-founders, not to serve and protect, but for their wallets.
In a recent blog post, Wuwei Liang, the brother of imprisoned CoinXP co-founder Liang Liang, warned that under no circumstances should executives hand over their private keys when detained by Chinese police. Responding to news of Multichain co-founder Jun Zhao’s arrest, he wrote:
“As long as the police see the money and get the money, they will make up their minds, charge the case with crimes, and confiscate the assets. If you lose the secret key, you will lose everything, you will lose your life and wealth, and you will be imprisoned wrongly.”
Earlier in July, China’s largest cross-chain protocol used by the likes of Fantom and Binance alike, with over $10 billion in total value locked at its peak, closed down for good after developers disclosed that its CEO, Jun Zhao, was arrested by Chinese police in May. Zhao allegedly held control of all protocol MPC nodes, access to private keys and investors’ funds.
1. On May 21, 2023, Multichain CEO Zhaojun was taken away by the Chinese police from his home and has been out of contact with the global Multichain team ever since. The team contacted the MPC node operators and learned that their operational access keys to MPC node servers had…
— Multichain (Previously Anyswap) (@MultichainOrg) July 14, 2023
Without Zhao, the protocol and users’ assets were as good as gone. While cryptocurrency exchanges, mining and initial coin offerings are illegal in China, outright ownership of cryptocurrencies isn’t illegal, and there is currently a gray area regarding crypto projects outside of prohibited categories.
But Liang says that “profit-driven law enforcement projects are fundamentally after money,” raising the example of CoinXP’s ongoing case. In 2018, Liang Liang founded the CoinXP blockchain and its ecosystem DApp Hubdex after raising 13,000 Ether (around $30 million) from an initial coin…
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