90% of crypto-related businesses shut down in China after ban

More than 20 major firms involved in crypto currency, including trading exchange, crypto mining and crypto information platforms, have suspended services to Chinese mainland users and announced plans to leave the Chinese market as of Friday.

Their exit means over 90 percent of cryptorelated businesses have been shut down in China following the country’s broad and strictest ban on crypto trading yet, observers said, which further closes loopholes in the government’s crackdown on an industry that poses tremendous financial and criminal risks, and cuts off Chinese speculators’ access to the crypto market.

Huobi, one of the three major exchanges with a large Chinese user base, released detailed rules on the exit in early October, after it announced in September it would finish de-registering users whose personal identification details show them as mainland residents at the end of 2021. The platform suspended new registrations for mainland users on September 24.

Binance, another big three crypto exchange, also halted new registrations for mainland users in September.

Other smaller trading platforms such as BiKi said it will officially stop operations on November 30.

“Almost all major crypto business providers have plans to shut down Chinese service. And those left and not in the scope of supervision are of very limited scale and not very well known, meaning that all the doors for Chinese to access the speculative market have been closed,” Shentu Qingchun, CEO of Shenzhenbased blockchain company BankLedger, told the Global Times on Friday.

In September, the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, ruled all crypto transactions illegal in China.