Cryptocurrency exchanges in China are sneaking past regulations using VPNs

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).