By
Svetlana Soroka
April 20th, 2024
Charlie Lee claims that OKCoin and Huobi are meeting regulators today. Whether this would make the two exchanges follow BTCC’s decision to halt trading remains unknown.
Continuing reports about China’s ICO ban and its plans to halt trading of bitcoin and other virtual currencies on domestic exchanges made markets of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies fall starting from Friday, September 8th over the next several days.
This Monday some sources added more details to this uncertain situation reporting that while Chinese authorities were planning to ban bitcoin trading on domestic exchanges, they had no plans to stop non-commercial, over-the-counter transactions.
All in all at that time China’s central bank didn’t make any official confirmation or denial, which was definitely good news. Now the things seem to be changing.
Litecoin creator Charlie Lee tweeted that the leading Chinese cryptocurrency exchanges OKCoin and Huobi are meeting with regulators on Friday, despite the exchanges themselves claimed that they had not been contacted by authorities.
OKCoin and Huobi are meeting with regulators tomorrow. They might soon change their tune. 😞 https://t.co/sS05td86X4
— Charlie Lee Ⓜ️🕸️ (@SatoshiLite) September 14, 2017
At the same time, the cryptocurrency news service cnLedger stated:
3/ OKCoin and Huobi PR said they have not received notice from regulators and are operating normally
— cnLedger (@cnLedger) September 14, 2017
If OKCoin and Huobi do really suspend trading on their high-volume exchanges, they will join the BTCC, which announced the suspension of its exchange scheduled at September 30.
The news were published yesterday, September 14, on BTCC’s Twitter:
1/ After carefully considering the announcement published by Chinese regulators on 09/04, BTCChina Exchange will stop all trading on 09/30.
— BTCC (@YourBTCC) September 14, 2017
The exchanges calmed down its users adding that other products and services, including mining pools and international exchange, would not be affected by the upcoming suspense, thus remaining operational:
2/ BTCC products, including BTCC Pool, are not affected by this change. Please contact us at [email protected] if you have any questions. https://t.co/r3HvINU20p
— BTCC (@YourBTCC) September 14, 2017
The news regarding one of the top-three bitcoin exchanges in China and one of top-five in the world has caused a lot of confusion within cryptocurrency community.
Some sources stick to the view that BTCC’s decision to stop trading has nothing to do with the rumors regarding exchanges being shut down. The real reason is believed to be BTCC’s recently launched cryptocurrency ICO platform, shut-down of which made the parent company undergo some changes as well. In such a way, the trading halt is considered to be temporary, despite no one knows how long this suspension will last.
After bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies had showed signs of recovery few days ago, regulatory uncertainty shook the crypto markets on Thursday, September 14, causing bitcoin price fall to below $3,000 at Chinese markets.
According to the data from CoinMarketCap’s Index, Bitcoin is trading at about $2849.29 on OkCoin, $2871.43 – on Huobi, and $2843.94 – on BTCC at press time.
The overall bitcoin price has been weighed down by BTC/CNY, but it is still holding above $3,000 currently making $3069. The token represents a daily decline of more than 20 percent and a weekly decline of 35 percent accordingly.
The news also haven’t passed by the total cryptocurrency market cap, which now constitutes only $105 billion after rising as high as $170 later reaching even 180 billion less than two weeks ago.