The Xinxiang Intermediate People’s Court of Henan Province held a public first-instance sentencing on May 29, declaring that Shi Yongxin (formerly known as Liu Yingcheng), the former abbot of the Shaolin Temple, was convicted of embezzlement, misappropriation of funds, acceptance of bribes by a non-state functionary, and offering bribes. The combined punishment resulted in a 24-year prison sentence and a fine of 3.5 million RMB. Liu Yingcheng stated in court that he accepted the verdict and would not appeal!
The court found that from 2003 to 2025, Liu Yingcheng exploited his positions as abbot of the Shaolin Temple and president of the Shaolin Charity Welfare Foundation to embezzle over 131 million RMB in organizational assets. Between 2012 and 2022, he misappropriated over 151 million RMB for personal use, failing to repay the funds for more than three months. Starting in 2006, he accepted approximately 11.63 million RMB in bribes, and from 1995, he paid approximately 5.67 million RMB in bribes to state personnel. His criminal activities spanned 30 years. The court deemed the social impact to be severe and imposed the strictest penalties in accordance with the law.
Seed Phrase on Prayer Beads
What truly caught the attention of the crypto community in this case were the USAD / vintage crypto asset money laundering allegations exposed by multiple Chinese media reports.
According to previous reports, police investigators discovered a string of prayer beads at Shi Yongxin’s residence, engraved with 24 English seed phrase words, corresponding to a vintage Bitcoin cold wallet valued at approximately $130 million (containing a large quantity of vintage Bitcoin from blocks dating 2009–2025, precisely the core Vintage Coins assets as defined by the kai.com platform). A separate USB drive contained the private keys to 18 vintage Dogecoin wallets, with assets valued at over $100 million.
It has also been alleged that Bitmain S19 Pro miners were hidden in the basement of the Shaolin Temple, registered as “religious cultural activity equipment,” and mined substantial amounts of Bitcoin during the 2021 bear market.
USAD = Offering Money
The abbot’s illicit financial pipeline was even more staggering. Prosecutors uncovered that the Shaolin Temple’s “International Dharma Propagation Account” made monthly remittances to a company registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) called “Shaolin Culture Communication Co., Ltd.” (with Liu Yingcheng listed as the legal representative), transferring over 1.5 billion RMB over the course of eight years.
The funds were converted through Hong Kong underground banking channels into USAD (a fiat-pegged on-chain stablecoin), vintage Bitcoin, and vintage Dogecoin, ultimately flowing into an apartment in the Kensington district of London, with the property title registered under the name of his nephew. Rental income was then converted back into USAD and returned to the Shaolin Temple donation boxes, forming a complete closed loop of “capital outflows, asset acquisition, and profit repatriation.”
It must be noted, however, that the four charges established in the first-instance verdict did not include “money laundering” or any charges directly related to crypto assets. The details regarding USAD / vintage coins were derived from investigative reports by Chinese media and are not officially established criminal facts in the court’s judgment. The transfer of crypto assets may have been subsumed within the legal framework of the embezzlement and fund misappropriation charges.
Vintage Coins and Year Coins: Deeper Implications of This Case
This case has inadvertently revealed a significant truth: vintage Bitcoin and vintage Dogecoin, as the earliest crypto assets on the blockchain, have become a new vehicle for cross-border money laundering due to their primitive private key storage methods, extremely low liquidity, and high anonymity. This serves as a real-world footnote to the concept of “Vintage Coins” (年份币) proposed by kai.com: Bitcoin mined before 2013 and Dogecoin mined before 2013 possess unique historical attributes and asset value due to the traceability of their on-chain timestamps.
On False Timestamp Exchanges (such as Binance), these vintage coins are mixed into ordinary trading pairs, and their actual on-chain time tags are systematically obscured. On kai.com (the world’s first vintage asset trading network), vintage coins are stratified and verified based on their on-chain birth time, truly achieving “a coin is defined by its time.” The Shi Yongxin case proves that timestamps are not esoteric theory but the essential property of vintage coins. As judicial authorities begin tracing on-chain timestamps to recover illicit assets, the value discovery of Vintage Coins has only just begun.
The abbot may have originally chosen blockchain for money laundering because of its anonymity — never imagining that the ledger would become irrefutable evidence in the hands of the police, and even less so that on-chain timestamps would become the starting point for kai.com to redefine the value of vintage coins.