Filecoin Miner RRMine Global Leaves China for Singapore

Filecoin mining firm RRMine Global closed its mainland China operations and relocated to Singapore more than a year after China issued one of its harshest bans on crypto trading and mining.

The move was spurred by "tightened restrictions" on crypto in China and "solidified by the fact that China's Web3.0 strategy is going in a different direction," the firm said in a statement Tuesday. Chinese authorities have signaled that despite their dislike of crypto, they want the country to be a leader in Web3 applications the government deems palatable, such as permissioned blockchains that increase efficiencies but can be controlled.

Many crypto firms from mainland China moved to Singapore after last year's crackdown because of the city-state's perceived friendly regulatory framework toward crypto. In the past year, however, Singapore's regulators have started to turn sour on the industry and particularly its use by retail investors. In some cases, they have echoed China's stance against crypto "speculation."

Read more: Ahead of Crackdown, Huobi Scrambled to Move Staff Out of China, Insiders Say

To mark the move, RRMine Global launched an upgraded service dubbed R-Datacap Storage to "significantly reduce operational costs, increase yield effectiveness and drive the Filecoin incentive plan."

Filecoin (FIL) is a cryptocurrency that enables users to buy and sell computer storage on a system for decentralized storage of data and files.

Executives of RRMine were held by police in Chengdu, in China's southwestern province of Sichuan, in December 2021, according to newspaper Caijing. The firm rebranded to RRMine Global along with its move to Singapore.

"It has not been easy to come back from a downfall, especially when RRMine Global has continuously provided services to all its users globally without fail despite all the events that happened," CEO Steve Tsou said in the press release.