NIO Employee Illegally Mined Ethereum With Company Servers

On Wednesday, a Weibo blogger revealed an internal note issued by Chinese EV maker NIO showing that an administrator of a cluster server surnamed Zhang had used the company’s servers to illegally mine the digital currency Ethereum.

Since February of last year, the employee has used the computing power resources of the company’s servers to mine digital currency and make profits, violating the company’s regulations. In the investigation, Zhang confessed to his behavior.

ETH is a digital token of Ethereum, which, like other digital currency, can be bought and sold on the trading platform. At present, the total market value of the Ethereum currency exceeds $400 billion, making it the second largest cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin.

In fact, this is not the first case of an employee using a company’s server resources to mine digital currency to earn money. According to documents previously published by China Judgments Online, from the end of January to the end of May, 2018, a senior operations and maintenance engineer at a Chinese internet company illegally controlled 155 servers by compiling scripts, mining Bitcoin and Monero, making a profit of more than 100,000 yuan ($15,716) by selling Bitcoin.

China’s crackdown on mining cryptocurrency is also in action in various other places. In December, 2021, regulatory authorities in Zhejiang Province raided 36 IP addresses of 20 state-owned companies in seven regions of the province, and investigated a number of cases in which people used public resources to participate in virtual currency mining and trading.

SEE ALSO: China NFT Weekly: China’s Crackdown on Crypto Continues

In recent years, security problems with software, networks and industrial supply chains have emerged in the new energy vehicle industry, which also brings challenges to automobile safety supervision. On April 1, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and three other departments jointly issued a notice to start pilot work for sandbox supervision in the field of automobile safety.