China’s digital yuan architect accused of $8 million crypto bribery scheme. State broadcaster CCTV aired details of Yao Qian’s corruption scheme on January 14 in a documentary titled “Technology Empowering Anti-Corruption,” showing how investigators traced 2000 Ethereum (valued at 60 million yuan at peak prices) from a businessman to Yao’s personal wallet in 2018.

Chinese state media have detailed a high-profile corruption case involving Yao Qian, a former senior Chinese financial regulator and one of the early architects of the digital yuan (e-CNY). According to a January 14 CCTV documentary titled “Technology Empowering Anti-Corruption,” investigators traced around 2,000 ETH sent in 2018 by a businessman to wallets controlled by Yao, part of more than $8 million in alleged cryptocurrency bribes he is accused of taking while holding senior posts at the People’s Bank of China and the China Securities Regulatory Commission. The program described how Yao allegedly used hardware wallets, multiple shell accounts, and layered blockchain addresses to disguise the flow of funds, converting part of the crypto into fiat to finance, among other things, a high-end Beijing property purchase. The case has been politically and symbolically significant because Yao previously led the Digital Currency Research Institute at the People’s Bank of China, where he was an influential figure in the development and promotion of the digital yuan. Disciplinary authorities expelled him from the Communist Party of China in November 2024, citing extensive “power-for-money” dealings, including misuse of digital assets and the digital yuan, and transferred his case for criminal prosecution. State media and regulators have used the investigation as a showcase of how blockchain forensics can both uncover and deter corruption, positioning the episode as a test case for China’s broader approach to supervising digital assets and central bank digital currency infrastructure going forward.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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