The Future of Cryptocurrencies Is Still Unsure In China

As we learned last week, the Chinese court had finally ruled Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a digital property. This meant that citizens can now legally buy Bitcoin within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – a space that notoriously doesn’t care much for cryptocurrencies.

Will The Chinese Government Let Up On Cryptocurrency Regulation?

Due to this change, it was expected that the Chinese government might let up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a whole. In fact, the country is to thank for close to 60% of the Bitcoin’s hash power while cryptocurrency exchanges within the space manage the same percentage in global trading of Tether, reports CoinTelegraph.

However, in spite of these positive numbers, those in power in China still stand in the way of cryptocurrency regulation. Read: they’ve not done much in favor of digital assets. In fact, in September of 2017, China banned cryptocurrency exchanges and ICOs from participating in the country. That said, the ban didn’t cover everything. For example, citizens simply can’t convert fiat to cryptocurrencies. They can, however, trade cryptocurrencies they already own. That is, according to Jehan Chu, the co-founder of Kenetic Capital who spoke to the publication:

“While exchanges and companies that are trading Bitcoin have been banned in China personal ownership and exchange has not been ruled illegal. This has left space for individual ownership while institutional Chinese trade has moved offshore, but intact.”

Even more interesting is that despite this initial ban on cryptocurrencies, the Chinese government is still quite interested in blockchain technology. In fact, they’re possibly looking into building their own regional digital asset to compete with Facebook’s upcoming Libra stablecoin. This is partly because China wants to compete if, somehow, Libra ensures that the U.S. dollar becomes the dominant asset worldwide and the fact that Libra’s intentions are pretty unclear in the public sphere as of now.

We’re still unsure as to what will happen, but things could lean in favor of cryptocurrencies is we see more cases like this in China.