Ju Tsai, a former executive vice president of China-based tech giant Alibaba, will replace Daniel Zhang as the company’s president.
In the June 20 announcement, Alibaba He said Zhang will step down as the company’s president and CEO from September 10, after which he will continue to serve as president and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group. Tsai, through wealth manager Blue Pool Capital, has been behind investments in several crypto companies, including FTX, Polygon’s $450 million funding round in February, and Web3 Artifact Labs.
I love cryptocurrency
– Joe Tsai (@joetsai1999) December 28, 2021
Eddie Youngming Wu, chairman of Taobao and Tmall Group, will follow Zhang as CEO of Alibaba as well as replace him on the company’s board. Alibaba is one of the largest companies in the world, with a market capitalization of more than $225 billion at press time, after Tencent, Kweichow Moutai and ICBC among China-based companies.
“I look forward to working with Eddy to unlock the next phase of growth through technology and innovation,” said Tsai.
Related: Tech giant Alibaba puts up an AI competitor to ChatGPT
China has a mixed relationship with cryptocurrency and blockchain. The country was notorious for cracking down on mining companies in 2021, which led to an exodus of companies to other jurisdictions, but it has also been pushing a digital yuan experiment through the People’s Bank of China.
However, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) seem to operate in a regulatory gray area in China. Alibaba launched an NFT marketplace for copyright trading in 2021 as well as an NFT solution within its cloud business unit — the latter was taken down without explanation shortly after its launch.
magazine: China’s wave of ChatGPT competitors, Alibaba goes multi-chain: Asia Express