BTCChina, the country’s first bitcoin exchange, gives up on the cryptocurrency amid Beijing’s tightening crackdown
- BTCChina, which once ran the country’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said it has ‘completely exited from bitcoin-related businesses’
- Beijing’s latest bitcoin crackdown has forced mining operations across the country to close and other businesses to distance themselves from cryptocurrencies
The company said on Thursday that it has “completely exited from bitcoin-related businesses” and that it sold its stake in the Singapore-registered bitcoin exchange ZG.com to an unidentified foundation in Dubai in May 2020.
BTCChina was founded in 2011 by Huang Xiaoyu and Yang Linke, who helped push the idea of bitcoin to Chinese investors when it was still a foreign concept to most people in the country, including the government. The company once claimed that it accounted for 80 per cent of the world’s cryptocurrency trading, but it was later caught up in the China’s various cryptocurrency crackdowns. In 2017, the company said it would stop trading cryptocurrencies following the government’s ban at the time.
In its latest announcement, BTCChina said it was exiting the bitcoin business “in response to the [Chinese] government’s policy”, which set off a new crackdown that has already forced the closure of many of the country’s mining operations.
Beijing regards cryptocurrencies as a threat to financial stability, as it allows people to circumvent the government’s strict capital controls. There are also concerns about price volatility. The latest crackdown came after the price of bitcoin increased sevenfold over the course of a year and then plummeted by more than 40 per cent in one month.