ICO Ban: Bitcoin Exchange Binance Restricts Chinese Access

Binance, the exchange which is known for funding its operations through an ICO token called the BNB and having a high volume of NEO trading, has taken the news of Chinese regulatory changes in stride: fine, they say, the Chinese simply can’t trade here anymore.

Binance posted the following to their blog early Sunday morning Chinese time:

In accordance with the recent notice from China PBoC and requests from various government offices, Binance will make the following adjustments:

1. Per requests from their respective core teams, we will suspend trading and deposit services of the following tokens: HCC, LLT, ELC, BTM, YOYO. Withdrawal will continue to work. Each team will announce the refund plan of their tokens.
2. We will restrict all Chinese IP addresses from trading. They will continue to be able to visit the user center and make withdrawals.
3. Binance will perform a system upgrade from 2017/09/07 00:00 (Beijing Time). The upgrade is expected to last 2-3 hours. We will suspend registration, login, deposit, withdraw and trading during the upgrade. We will try to shorten the downtime as much as possible. The above 2 changes will be in effect after this upgrade.

Going forward, Binance will refocus and redouble our efforts in servicing our international audience, which currently accounts for 82.5% of our user base (according to Alexa). […]

Absent from the list of delisted currencies are the bigger volume coins at Binance: NEO, GAS, ETH, WTC. NEO and WTC, at least, appear to have serious ramifications as regard Chinese regulation, but they have not made the move to back out of it all.

We expect that more Chinese-region exchanges will begin to comply with the law rather than suffer potential consequences. In the same way that US investors are banned from many of the world’s more interesting financial instruments, it seems Chinese investors will have to find alternative means to acquire hard cryptocurrency. At time of writing, no other exchanges were known to the author to have already banned Chinese citizens from trading.

Featured image from Shutterstock.