By
Steve Muchoki
April 18th, 2024
Bitcoin price recovers as Chinese authorities and bitcoin industry push for regulatory alliance.
Bitcoin is currently strengthening its positions. The cryptocurrency is traded at $1,127 as of the moment of writing, according to the CoinMarketCap.
The price recovery comes amid speculations among investors that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will approve at least one of the three proposed bitcoin-focused exchange-traded funds. The doubts are expressed by Wall Street analysts who don’t believe that any will be approved.
Bitcoin has risen more than 40% since January following the news from China and despite the information that country’s largest exchanges would begin charging a flat fee of 0.2% on all transactions and that two of China’s largest bitcoin exchanges were blocking withdrawals.
Almost immediately after withdrawals on Huobi and OKCoin, leading Chinese exchanges, were disabled, LocalBitcoins China trading volumes began to surge. Bitcoin traders started looking for ways out of the situation and apparently flocked to peer-to-peer marketplaces to continue buying and selling the cryptocurrency.
Reportedly, last week a meeting was held between the officials from the People’s Republic of China (PBoC) and the representatives from leading Chinese bitcoin exchanges at the Museum of Internet Finance. They gathered together to discuss compliance and explore ways in which the latter can comply with the country’s regulations and form a regulatory partnership.
EconoTimes reports that the parties focused on ten key points during the meeting:
- The launch of a specific department for risk control and compliance assessment.
- The establishment of a framework for governance and security mechanism, which will be evaluated by third parties.
- Exchanges are to organize their work strictly in accordance with AML/KYC regulations and refuse to provide services to risky enterprises or organizations.
- Companies in this space should maintain records containing information on the company including its title, details of the head of the company, business model, potential risks and control mechanisms and report the same to the alliance and local regulators.
- To focus on educating the public on the technology and associated risks including ICOs.
- Implementation of anti-money laundering and anti-telecom fraud mechanisms – using video authentications and biometrics verification to upgrade real-name (verifying) systems.
- The exchanges must implement Anti-Ponzi schemes or anti-MLM schemes – appropriate limits such as the amount of money per person per year need to be set.
- Enforcement of anti-market manipulation and anti-capital misappropriation.
- Interbank information sharing and deploying blacklisting and whitelisting mechanisms.
- Blockchain companies should actively assume the responsibility of protecting the safety of personal information.
Star Xu, OKLink founder and CEO, commented that these measures will contribute to the creation of healthy environment in the industry as a whole.