Alibaba, China’s e-commerce and tech giant, will launch a crypto mining platform? No, never!

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA), released an statement on its official Weibo account, saying that

Alibaba’s “P2P Nodes” platform has nothing to do with  “crypto mining ” and “virtual currency”.

According to the statement, Ali Cloud emphasizes that it will never launch any virtual currencies like bitcoin and provide any so-called “mining platform” neither. As for the fake news,someone will be held liable for their wrong doing.

This is a respond to the widespread rumor issued by Tencent News last night that Alibaba has launched a virtual currency mining platform known as “P2P Nodes”, which has been registered in Nanjing.

The timing of such news is very sensitive, as China’s government is planning to wipe out its bitcoin mining industry following concerns of excessive electricity consumption and financial risks.

Alibaba Cloud clarified that the “P2P Nodes” platform is actually the the Content Delivery Network(CDN) that is based on P2P technology. It merely provides multi-user shared bandwidth acceleration service which is common in the CDN industry.

Hu Xiaoming, the president of Alibaba Cloud, shared this clarification post. He once condemned bitcoin as ponzi scheme in a closed-door conference while claiming that the future for blockchain looks promising.

In an interview with CNBC in December, Alibaba founder Jack Ma said that the group had sped up efforts on researching blockchain technology, but he himself and Alibaba did not have much interest in bitcoin.

“For Bitcoin, I don’t have much interest, what I want to know is, what can bitcoin bring to society?” But anyway, I think blockchain technology is very powerful, so in Alipay business of Alibaba, we are also trying to ensure that we can push the world into a cashless society. But bitcoin, we look at it in a very careful way. I am not very familiar with Bitcoin, I am always curious. But I think for bitcoin enthusiasts like you, Bitcoin is inseparable. ”Ma said.