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Residents in Shenzhen have proceeded nearly 140,000 transactions in digital yuan during a 10-day city-wide test of China’s central bank digital currency, known as DC/EP.

The city of Shenzhen conducted a second run of the digital yuan test starting from January 7 by giving away $3 million worth-of digital yuan to 100,000 local citizens via a lottery. According to a WeChat post from the local government on Monday, more than 1.8 million signed up for the 100,000 tickets.

As of January 17, 95,628 lottery-winners have activated their digital yuan wallets and made 139,794 transactions during the test period with a total spending of 18.22 million yuan, or $2.8 million.

In addition, the post said some of the participants topped up their DC/EP wallets by a total of 1.51 million yuan, or some $232,000.

The post said although the unspent free digital yuan will be voided after the test concludes on January 17, participants’ digital yuan wallets will remain functional. Users who wish to top up their DC/EP wallets via their bank accounts can still spend digital yuan in more than 10,000 local stores that support the DC/EP payment method.

China kicked off its first city-wide digital yuan test via a lottery in Shenzhen in last October, with over 47,000 participants spending $1.3 million via 62,000 transactions.

It was followed by the city of Suzhou on a much larger scale and the latest test returned to Shenzhen. Meanwhile, a Shanghai hospital recently tested card-based digital yuan hardware wallets.

Also, in Shanghai, Alibaba’s payment affiliate Ant Financial quietly conducted a digital yuan test via its AliPay app, which was the first known instance where the DC/EP was experimented in a wallet developed by non-state-owned entities.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Chipmaker Nvidia could start manufacturing dedicated crypto mining GPUs (graphics processing units) if there is demand, according to its CFO Colette Kress. 

Speaking at a conference last week, Kress said, “if crypto demand begins or if we see a meaningful amount, we can also use that opportunity to restart the CMP product line to address ongoing mining demand.” CMP refers to dedicated crypto-mining cards, which remove the video outputs that are needed for gamers. 

At present, Nvidia isn’t sure how much demand is coming from crypto miners, although an RBC analyst recently estimated that the company sold $175 million worth of the Ampere GPUs to ether (ETH) miners. 

“We don’t have visibility on how much of the RTX 30 Series end demand comes from mining,” said Kress. “So, we don’t believe it’s a big part of our business today. Gaming demand is very strong, and we think that’s larger than our current supply.”

GPUs are more commonly used for mining coins such as ETH, while bitcoin is mined via application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Ruffer Investment Company, the British fund manager which recently revealed it had bet £550m on bitcoin, has published more details about the headline-grabbing move.

In a review covering the six months to December 31, 2020, Ruffer said it has a history of using “unconventional protections” and that it views bitcoin in that same vein during a prolonged period of low interest rates.

“We think we are relatively early to this, at the foothills of a long trend of institutional adoption and financialisation of bitcoin,” the company added.

The Guernsey-based Ruffer disclosed its bitcoin exposure in a regulatory filing on December 15. At the time, the company told The Block that the exposure was worth around £550m, equivalent to roughly 2.7% of the firm’s assets under management.

The latest filing states that the position is held through the Ruffer Multi Strategies Fund as well as through equity holdings in Microstrategy and Galaxy Digital. The former is a business intelligence firm that bought more than $1bn in bitcoin in 2020, the latter a well-known capital markets business specialising in digital assets. Both are publicly listed. Ruffer’s filing shows it has a £1.14m position in Microstrategy and a £2.17m stake in Galaxy.

The company describes bitcoin’s “bad reputation” as a risk premium.

“As we move through the process of normalisation, regulation, and institutionalisation, the compression of this premium can have a dramatic effect on the price. If we are wrong, bitcoin will return to the shadows and we will lose money – this explains why we have kept the position size small but meaningful,” it added.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.