China’s Baidu Enters FinTech, Invests in American Blockchain Company

The Chinese search engine Baidu could be moving towards resuming a strategy that will sooner or later lead it to start accepting Bitcoins - again. The company is continuing with its growing interest in FinTech in a cross-connection manner between the Asian giant and the leading global market in the US by investing in a second U.S. fintech company in a month. Baidu recently invested in a US blockchain company, Circle Internet Financial Inc., after the Bitcoin startup announced it had raised $60 million in funding from a consortium which was led by IDG, an American based media, data and....

China’s most popular search engine, Baidu, froze bitcoin ads Thursday in what Bloomberg suggests is a “growing wariness” on behalf of business and government. Baidu Mimicking Official Sentiment? Baidu has declined to comment on the move, but the ban has been confirmed by both Huobi and Okcoin, local Chinese exchanges. Since Thursday, speculation has....

Baidu, China’s largest search engine and web services company, has recently halted all Bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related advertising on its network. CnLedger, a Chinese media network which recently received a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China earlier this week, broke the news on August 25, 2016. While many Bitcoin online forums and communities somewhat expected a government pressured company like Baidu to set a negative precedent for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, the announcement of Baidu is quite ironic considering the fact that the internet giant invested in....

News has come in this morning that Baidu has banned bitcoin advertising on its website which handles almost all of China’s search inquiries. The action follows the tragic death of Wei Zexi, a college student with cancer who sought treatment from a hospital found through an online advertisement. Zexi stated in a post before his death that Baidu had mislead him to seek treatment from a hospital that had advertised a treatment researched in collaboration with Stanford. This turned out to be untrue, sending the Chinese internet on fire and bringing to surface seemingly long-held allegations of....

Baidu Jiasule ("Baidu Accelerated"), a Cloudflare-like service offering a website firewall, protection against distributed denial of service attacks and other similar features, has started accepting bitcoins as payment. The Bitcoin payment option is currently manual, with the main site telling its users to contact a phone number if they need to pay with Bitcoin, but this is nevertheless the first instance of a major Chinese site accepting payments in Bitcoin. The news is particularly significant because of the connection to Baidu, a site which is often seen as a Chinese equivalent to....