Everyone makes mistakes but when you cover Chinese regulations, you have to be a bit more careful than CCN. The site reported that and I'm quoting here: "China’s Merchants are Legally Allowed to Accept Bitcoin and Crypto". But that's totally not what happened and it matters because the market is very sensitive to news coming out from China. So what did happen then? The International Court of Arbitration closed a case where one party refused to transfer crypto to the other party after receiving payment in fiat. The court, which is an arbitration court, so it doesn't make law, it just interprets law, had to decide if existing contract law and general provisions of the civil law do apply in this case. The court did say owning and transferring Bitcoin is not illegal in China, the general civil law provisions should apply, and therefore the contract must be honored. It did not say merchants are legally allowed to accept cryptocurrencies. That's a whole different story, because that is challenging the status of Renminbi, the government fiat currency.

BitGo announced the launch of WBTC or wrapped Bitcoin, which is an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, fully backed by bitcoin. The project will launch in January next year in partnership with Kyber Network and the Republic Protocol. The idea sounds weird at first. Why would you need anything like this? But if you think about it, there are use cases when Bitcoin on Ethereum makes a whole lot of sense.

Currently, you cannot use Bitcoin in decentralized applications, because Bitcoin is not very programmable. You can, with some black magic, create smart contracts on Bitcoin, but these are not very... smart. Their functionality is rather limited. Dapps include decentralized exchanges, and you cannot really trade Bitcoin on decentralized exchanges today. With WBTC, you can program Bitcoin like any other ERC20 token. You can write smart contracts for collateralized lending, payments, escrow, et cetera. It sounds weird, and the reaction by the Bitcoin maximalists was not very friendly, as you can imagine, it is actually quite exciting.