By
Steve Muchoki
April 19th, 2024
Digital payment arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, Alipay, takes an anti-cryptocurrency stance and bans all Bitcoin and cryptocurrency transactions on its platform.
Alipay has indicated that it will ban Bitcoin transactions and all others related to cryptocurrency payments. In what seems like an extension on the cryptocurrency war that the Chinese government is waging, the electronic payments giant said in a tweet thread that it would terminate all cryptocurrency-related transactions.
If any transactions are identified as being related to bitcoin or other virtual currencies, @Alipay immediately stops the relevant payment services.
— Alipay (@Alipay) October 10, 2019
This comes amidst the Binance announcement on being able to accept fiat currencies from Alipay as a deposit option. However, Changpeng Zhao has indicated that the exchange is not working directly with the electronic payments giant but rather peer-to-peer transactions are still the norm.
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1181861386525106176
This of course not the first time that Alipay is going after Bitcoin-related transactions. Last year, Alipay banned all over the counter transactions that had something to do with the Bitcoins. This, of course, showed that the electronic payments giant is doing everything it can to toe the line of the Chinese government as regards cryptocurrency trading. It has also shown that there is some form or the other of shadow trading of cryptocurrencies going on via payment platforms like Alipay.
While shadow trading will still be a problem, it is the methods that Alipay employs that indicates that the country with about 25% of the world’s population may love blockchain technology but has a mixed relationship with cryptocurrencies. Already, sources indicate that the Chinese want to launch their national cryptocurrency anytime from now. This national cryptocurrency will work alongside the Chinese yuan.
The United States already has stablecoins (not national though) that are tied to the US Dollar and though the future of Facebook‘s Libra may currently be in doubt, the world’s largest economy also has a love-hate relationship with cryptocurrencies as well. So, Alipay’s position is quite understandable considering that most people still don’t understand what cryptocurrencies really are in the first place.
While the majority of the working Chinee are tech-savvy, their approach towards cryptocurrencies has been overshadowed by the rules and regulations that the Chinese government and its Central Bank have imposed on the world’s second-largest economy.
However, the Chinese, being the innovative people, have always found ways and means to skirt around the rules which the government turns a blind eye to most of the time but implements strict control once too many people start breaking the rules. Now that Alipay has decided to ban cryptocurrency transactions, we may see a broad range of measures which will affect the cryptocurrency markets implemented by the