Several Blockchain Providers Get Regulatory Approval in China

For a country that remains committed to keeping cryptocurrencies and a significant portion of related activities out, China seems to always be in the cryptocurrency news. On October 21, local news outlet 8BTC reported that the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Internet regulator, and oversight agency of the country, has approved a set of registered blockchain service providers to operate within the country.

Blockchain for everyone

Per the report, a second list of registered companies was published recently, and it includes 309 entities that cut across several industries, including but not limited to healthcare, culture, law, and more. Some of the highlighted services include HiCloud and AliCloud, both of which function as the blockchain divisions of tech giant Huawei and retail company Alibaba respectively. 

The report claimed that many of the companies listed are involved in the development of public blockchains, mining pools, and cryptocurrency wallets. Apart from private firms, government agencies were also listed, including the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, which is currently working on a cross-border business blockchain service platform. The Hangzhou Internet Notary Office, which is developing a blockchain-based electronic evidence repository, is listed as well.

P2P rescues the Chinese from the government ban 

The list sees China join a list of countries that accept blockchain technology in holistic plans but which seem to be averse to allowing cryptocurrencies. For the better part of two years now, cryptocurrency ownership and trading have been frowned upon by the Chinese government, with cryptocurrency exchanges being outlawed in the state as well. 

However, this isn’t to say that several exchanges haven’t been able to breach the Chinese wall. On August 27, popular peer-to-peer crypto exchange Hodl Hodl published a blog post announcing that it would be welcoming Chinese users after it successfully broke through a firewall set by the government to restrict exchanges in the country. 

In the post, Hodl Hodl explained that they had always used the reCAPTCHA service from Google as part of their onboarding process for new users, as it helps in rooting out trading bots. However, since the service has been blocked in China, the platform was left restricted and was kept out of the country.  To fix things, Hodl Hodl took the reCAPTCHA service off its Chinese infrastructure, thus making it easy for Chinese citizens to access the trading platform. 

In addition to Hodl Hodl, Binance also announced on October 9 that it would be launching its peer-to-peer trading service for Bitcoin, Ether, and Tether against the Chinese Yuan. There has been quite a lot of controversy concerning this new platform and how it plans to integrate its service with Alipay and WeChat Pay (two popular crypto-averse payment portals which Binance claimed to have added as payment methods), but the p2p platform has so far been functional. 

Despite the efforts of the Xi Jinping administration to keep cryptocurrencies out of the country, Chinese crypto enthusiasts have still been able to find a way to get their hands on their favorite assets. In the end, China isn’t so different from the rest of us.