Cryptocurrency exchanges in China are sneaking past regulations using VPNs

China
While the nation of China might be facing increasingly severe regulations in cryptocurrency, Chinese trading will unlikely be entirely banned. This is owing to measures that Chinese traders are taking in order to avoid the ban and continue investing.
According to the South China Morning Post, financial and economic news outlet Shanghai Securities Times reported that regulations had banned over 120 foreign cryptocurrency trading exchanges However, Chinese traders have avoided the ban by simply registering their domain under a new name.

Competition between the country’s trading exchanges has increased, and the ban has added an extra dynamic to the industry which is still flourishing.

Terence Tsang, the COO of TideBit -a cryptocurrency company which runs centralised  exchanges in Hong Kong and Taiwan – suggested that the “latest warning and potentially increased monitoring of foreign platforms [has] targeted at a batch of smaller exchanges that had claimed to be foreign entities, but are in fact operating in China claiming they have outsourced their operations to a Chinese company. Those exchanges whose website landing pages are in Chinese have drawn particular scrutiny by regulators.”

Although the trading volumes in China dropped mid-August, about a week ahead of shutting down all blockchain-related events in Beijing it looks as though it will be an impossible task to close down crypto-trading activity entirely. Leaders within the industry have said that moving servers out of China and conducting decentralized peer-to-peer trading is a way in which to avoid the Chinese regulations and continue trading practices.

Another way in which investors are skirting the ban is to convert their Chinese Yuan into stablecoin Tether, a token which is remarkably less volatile than Bitcoin and then continue to trade other cryptocurrencies through virtual private networks (VPNs).

A source linked to an exchange in China said to South China Morning Post that “Chinese regulators definitely have the technical ability to shut down VPNs, [however], traditionally it takes numerous conversations with different stakeholders to reach a consensus on configuring a firewall, which lengthens the process.”

Currently, there are no restrictions on the use of VPNs in the country, which therefore allows a consistent way for Chinese trading to continue.

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