At last, it was made public by several mainland China-based bitcoin exchanges that new policy will see renminbi disallowed on exchanges. The PBoC and Chinese financial regulators finally stopped dragging Chinese exchanges through one policy change to the next regarding renminbi, although there may be more to come.
Already having banned ICO financing and trading in ICO generated tokens, the halting of trading and transactions in renminbi is not surprising for the country which tightly controls its national currency.
Crypto to crypto trading will still be allowed and exchanges, for now, if they choose, can carry on business without uncertainty on the RMB issue. It remains to be seen how popular the exchanges will remain without the ability to transfer profits on crypto assets and convert them to the renminbi.
OKCoin, Huobi, and CHBTC, which are considered leading mainland Chinese bitcoin exchange put notifications regarding these changes on their websites, also in emails to users.
Another major Chinese exchange BTCChina announced yesterday they were saying bye to the mainland totally.
These exchanges are just too big to shut down RMB transactions on, anticipating a queue of CNY withdrawals were in consideration when the policy instructed to officially stop RMB business by October 31st. Starting now, exchanges will gradually be discontinuing pairings of digital assets against RMB. Users must also be informed of these changes by September 30th.
Additionally, one company has elected to just close its platform as it was announced that Chinese mining pool operator ViaBTC will close its newly started up exchange launched back in May. Initially, ViaBTC wanted to focus on domestic Chinese users with plans to then further expand out internationally.
After CNY was disallowed, the only asset the company had left to offer was Bitcoin against Bitcoin Cash, so not a hard decision from ViaBTC. We’ll see if they relaunch an exchange sometime soon for the international market minus mainland China. ViaBTC mining pool (pool.viabtc.com) and cloud mining services will not be affected.
To note, regulators did not announce bitcoin and other digital asset protocols are illegal. They are however pulling RMB out of the bitcoin exchange business, with no plans on sight to lift these policies in the near future.
Since January, Chinese bitcoin exchanges have responded diligently to a range of reforms to comply with increased inspection by Chinese regulators. The bitcoin industry was thrown into confusion on September 4th when China issued a directive banning initial coin offerings (ICOs) and trading in tokens generated by them.
Vlad Zamfir, a researcher at the Switzerland-based Ethereum Foundation told Reuters that it was no surprise China is moving against such currencies as Beijing has capital controls that are “in direct tension with the free ability to send any amount of money anywhere without any kind of delay.”
