Shenzhen Court Prices Seized Tokens
The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court has disclosed a criminal case in which virtual assets were appraised at more than 2.58 million yuan, in a summary posted on its official WeChat account on October 26. The post frames the dispute around a simple question: when an employee moves company virtual currency, is it theft or occupational embezzlement? The underlying prosecution was filed in 2024. The court held that virtual currency can deliver real economic benefit to its holder, carries property status under criminal law, and can therefore serve as the object of a property crime. The amount matters because it sets the sentencing band for the charge. On the money, the court relied on a forensic appraisal that took the token’s relative stability and the fiat exchange rate at the time of the offense as its benchmark, judged the result comparatively objective, and used it as a reference basis for the crime amount. Together with the quantity involved, more than 400,000 tokens, the court found the embezzlement amount crossed the statutory threshold for an especially large sum. The disclosure never names the token, leaving open whether the assets were stablecoins or units tied to a Layer 1 blockchain protocol. DeHeng partner Liu Yang has argued that the ratio of 400,000-plus units to 2.58 million yuan points to a stablecoin. Liu says he has not been able to obtain the judgment, so the appraisal institution, the authority that commissioned the work and the exact pricing method all remain unknown, as is the benchmark venue behind the quoted prices. He adds that recognizing the property attribute of virtual assets is already the mainstream practical position, backed by Supreme People’s Court reference cases, which makes the price question, not the property question, the real battlefield. His view, published this week, is that the two issues must be analyzed separately.
DeHeng Lawyer Attacks the Pricing Chain
Liu Yang’s objection is not that virtual assets lack property status; it is that no lawful procedure exists to fix their price. Early this year he discussed the problem with a prosecutorial practitioner in Shanghai who argued that a stablecoin’s value could be computed directly from the renminbi-dollar exchange rate and, since Hong Kong now has licensed exchanges, from exchange listings. Liu rejected both routes. His textual anchor is Notice No. 42, issued on February 6 by the People’s Bank of China and seven other agencies. The notice states that providing information intermediation and pricing services for virtual currency transactions within the mainland is illegal financial activity, and that overseas entities may not supply such services to mainland subjects in any form. In Liu’s reading, adopting a licensed Hong Kong venue’s order book as the benchmark price would amount to a court de facto recognizing that platform’s pricing power, and the SFC’s VATP license only certifies Hong Kong-local compliance. He adds that mainland authorities treat offshore trading platforms as illegal trading venues, so an appraisal built on their quotes lacks a lawful evidentiary source. Two further objections concern the appraiser itself. Market prices and exchange rates are financial market data, and under China’s judicial appraisal classification rules they fall outside the statutory scope of electronic data forensics. A price lookup is not a specialized problem under procedural law, Liu argues, since public quotes are ordinary information; commissioning an institution effectively transfers the court’s pricing responsibility to a third party. Price appraisals did appear in mass property cases such as PlusToken, a large-scale rug pull, mostly in smaller cities, while first-tier courts have mostly valued at liquidation proceeds. Appraisals by domestic forensic bodies and evidence taken from overseas exchange records raise the same questions, he reports from recent files, and current practice shows signs of a further breakthrough.
