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).