Alibaba’s
management shakeup announced Tuesday—part of the company’s wider restructuring to unlock value for shareholders—puts a crypto-friendly face in a top spot at the Chinese technology giant.
Joseph C. Tsai, currently Alibaba’s (ticker: BABA) executive vice chairman, will take over the chairman role as current chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang steps back to lead the group’s spinoff cloud intelligence arm. The elevation of Tsai, a proponent of and investor in blockchain technology, brings an endorsement of crypto to the top of Alibaba’s e-commerce business, possibly paving the way for payment innovations.
Tsai, who is a co-founder of Alibaba and also the owner of the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, has been a vocal proponent of digital assets for years, tweeting “I like crypto” in 2021 and subsequently making a number of investments across the space. That included an ill-fated position in collapsed crypto exchange FTX, with Tsai’s family office taking equity positions in the company in two fundraising rounds, the South China Morning Post reported, citing court filings.
Tsai’s family office also invested in the February 2022 round of Polygon, the platform supporting the Polygon token, the 12th-largest digital asset, according to Crunchbase data,
Tsai in the chairman role at Alibaba by no means spells a decisive crypto pivot for Alibaba—the e-commerce giant already counted the billionaire among its top leadership ranks, after all. But it does put a friendlier face to digital assets at the top of China’s most important technology company at a time when Alibaba has already shown signs of a blockchain push, and regulation in Hong Kong, where it is listed, has been becoming more open to crypto.
Through its cloud arm, Alibaba signed a deal earlier this year to work on advancements to Web3 ecosystems. And while
Bitcoin
and other cryptocurrency activities remain largely illegal in China, Hong Kong recently has begun courting crypto companies to the global business hub as regulation remains unclear and largely hostile in the U.S.
Tsai will sit atop Alibaba after the restructuring is complete, seeing him chair the holding company for Alibaba’s diverse interests as well as the entity that will retain control of the jewel in the company’s crown—its core e-commerce businesses including Taobao and Tmall. While Eddie Yongming Wu—named Zhang’s successor as Alibaba CEO—will remain chairman of Taobao and Tmall themselves, Tsai may still be in a position to push for disruption from the payments innovations offered by blockchain.
Write to Jack Denton at [email protected]
Read the full article here
