Episode 243 - Bitmain Coup?

Welcome to the CryptoBasic Podcast! This time around we don't go over a lot of things - we just focus on the basics, the important info, the headlines. Kung Fu, private militias, corporate coups, you know, the good stuff. If this sounds weird to you, tune in to find out what the heck has been going on with Bitmain and how the crypto space can sometimes offer stories and incidents that are truly hollywood-worthy.

• What is Bitmain exactly?
• Bitmain produces ASIC miners for the Bitcoin Blockchain. The Antminer. Basically the gold standard in mining gear.
• They also run Antpool, which is a big mining firm that has a lot of hashpower - but they aren't the biggest.
• Remember when we covered this in a flagship? Lets go back over.
• This was back in October 2019.
• Jihan Wu sent an e-mail to the entire Bitmain team that said that Ketuan Zhan was dismissed from the company.
• Wu was then given the roles of executive director and legal representative.
• Then is, Zhan still had 36% of the company in shares, and it wasn't clear what was happing with them.
• Zhan then filed a lawsuit in the Cayman islands to try and stop this from happening.
• They also filed to go public in the US with the SEC right before all of this.
• Zhan wins a victory in April.
• So the Bejing District Bureau if Justice actually went ahead and blocked Bitmain's attempt at replacing the legal representative with their current CFO. Even though Jihan Wu was the representative, Bitmain wanted to switch.
• This has been in courts since Jan 2.
• He was then granted the right to return to his post as legal representative.
• When he tried to attend the beaureau to collect his registration, he was surrounded by those loyal to Wu, and his license was grabbed from his hands.
• Then shit got physical, details are sparse.
• There's now TWO official seals somehow. Zhan wasn't in possession of the real one because it was physically taken from him. I guess in Chinese law the physical seal is pretty important. So there are now two serial numbers and there's dispute as to which one is accurate.
• Getting more interesting
• So most of the staff was working from home because of the Pandemic
• On June 4 Zhan actually sent all employees a notification via wechat that he was back in the office starting the day before, and that they needed to return to the office to work.
• There's literally a video out there of Zhan marchingg on the Bitmain offices with armed guards
• So he used his private guard force to enter the office and has apparently seized control.
• He was handing out $10,000 worth of Yuan for anyone that showed up to the office to work with him.
• He made a public decree to finish the IPO and have a market cap of over $50M in 5 years.
• It looks like Zhan has taken control of the company's Wechat account, and has been posting saying that the "new" seal is the official seal.
• Karim's video suggestion