Alibaba is furious with Lolli and its ‘Bitcoin partnership’ announcement

On Friday, we reported that Alibaba had ended its association with US-based Bitcoin startup Lolli.

The move came as no great surprise. The Chinese e-commerce giant is not, after all, a big fan of Bitcoin. Last month, for instance, we reported that its digital payments arm, Alipay, was banning any transactions related to it or other cryptocurrencies.

“It seems as though there was a miscommunication on Alibaba’s end and, while that’s unfortunate, we look forward to the possibility of working with Alibaba.com again in the future,” a Lolli spokesperson told RTIH.

No miscommunication whatsoever, Alibaba insisted. As for the comment that Alibaba Group’s AliExpress and its cloud computing service company, Alibaba Cloud, are still live on Lolli, a spokesperson said: “We are looking into that and I would imagine that if there are transaction-focused affiliate marketing programmes – again these are absolutely not partnerships – between those platforms and Lolli, there is a good chance they will also be terminated. The chances of us working with Lolli in the future are next to fairly low.”

In our previous article, Lolli said Alibaba had “deactivated the aforementioned partnership without cause”. Yet the latter insists there was never a partnership, but rather a transactional affiliate marketing programme that was created by a subcontractor of an Alibaba.com contractor without Alibaba.com’s knowledge.

“There were two reasons the programme with Lolli was not acceptable,” the spokesperson commented. “First, any company that announces something to the media without robust coordination with their business associate is not a business we want to be working with. Second, and most importantly, it’s the Alibaba Group policy not to do Bitcoin-related business.”

RTIH has contacted Lolli for further comment and will update this article in due course.