This weekly roundup of news from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong attempts to curate the industry’s most important news, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations.  

Bad news for Evergrande

Even after all the regulatory crackdowns, China isn’t letting 2021 slip away without a few more blows to the crypto markets. On December 9, the news revealed that massive real estate developer Evergrande had defaulted on its interest payments, and was thus subject to a credit rating downgrade.

Subsequently, crypto markets dipped significantly, which will be worrying to investors who are already mumbling about jobless rates and new COVID variants. On the bright side, if the situation with Evergrande goes from bad to worse, financial regulators are going to have their hands full, giving them less time to focus on stamping out cryptocurrency as we approach the final month and a half of the lunar calendar. 

Bitmart bouncing back

Bitmart was the unfortunate victim of a large hack on December 5, when $150m was taken from an Ethereum and BSC hot wallet. CEO Sheldon Xia quickly jumped on Twitter and announced that the hot wallets carry only a small portion of the assets on Bitmart and that the exchange was conducting a comprehensive security review. 

1/4 In response to this incident, BitMart has completed initial security checks and identified affected assets. This security breach was mainly caused by a stolen private key that had two of our hot wallets compromised. Other assets with BitMart are safe and…