Chinese Police Investigates CEO Of MicroBT For BTC Miner IP Theft

The Chinese Police investigates Yang Zuoxing formerly employed in Bitmain. The investigation seems to be related to a dispute concerning the intellectual property rights of Bitmain as we previously reported in the altcoin news. 

The CEO of MicroBT, Yang Zuoxing has been taken into custody by local law enforcement authorities in an open investigation potentially involving tens of millions of dollars, which is reported by the Chinese news outlet BlockBeat. Stating that the arrest of Zuoxing is related to taking advantage of certain insider information apropos the production of crypto mining hardware, the news outlet wrote:

“The risk of starting a business in the mining circle is very high. Not only must the company be prevented from being arrested by the old club.”

One of the best engineers at Bitmain was Yang, and he helped in the designing of the company’s crypto mining gear, like Antminer S7 and S9. MicroBT was started after a while by Zuoxing, as his own crypto mining chip company. He claimed back then that the hardware of MicroBT was as good, if not better than Bitmain’s. Yang stated:

“MicroBT’s flagship Whatsminer M10 can deliver better power efficiency than Bitmain’s S9i [and we are working] on upgrades to stay competitive as Bitmain rolls out new products. Their technology is great, but ours is too.”

Bitmain filed a lawsuit, after some period, against Zuoxing’s company for patent rights. Due to a lack of unique creativity, China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) dismissed Bitmain’s patent stating a lack of unique creativity. According to SIPO:

“If a technological solution sought by a patent has different characteristics than existing technologies, but such difference is public knowledge, then it is obvious the solution would incorporate this public knowledge.”

It is not clear at this moment why the Chinese Police are investigating Zuoxing but it looks as it has something to an intellectual property infringement dispute that Bitmain and MicroBT had. This all adds up with Bitmain’s co-founders fighting each other to take full control over the enterprise, to the civil war happening at Bitmain that could have serious implications on the company’s nature.