The exchanges decided to resume withdrawals as the People’s Bank of China made it clear they are not forbidden.
Two leading Chinese exchanges, Huobi and OkCoin, have decided to end the four-month freeze and resumed bitcoin withdrawals.
China used to be the world’s leading venue for bitcoin trading. The situation changed at the beginning of the year after the People’s Bank of China had started closely investigating the cryptocurrency market and conducted checks of the exchanges.
This resulted in major Chinese exchanges suspending withdrawals of bitcoins, introducing trading fees and stepping up scrutiny of clients amid discussions with authorities. Investors could only buy and sell bitcoins but couldn’t transfer, download or remove them.
Now, the exchanges decided to resume withdrawals as the People’s Bank of China made it clear they are not forbidden. Customers of BTCChina and OkCoin can withdraw up to 10 bitcoins a day. There is still no information when more formal regulation of the industry will begin.
According to the statement of Bobby Lee, chief executive of BTCChina, his exchange has started “testing” withdrawals after upgrading its “know your customer” and anti-money laundering systems.
The Chinese exchanges restore withdrawals with the price of bitcoin near an all-time high. The cryptocurrency is now traded at $2,448 on the CoinMarketCap.
The increased regulator interest in bitcoin coincided with a clampdown on capital outflows, as authorities wanted to relieve downward pressure on the yuan currency and stop the depletion of China’s foreign exchange reserves. Due to the anonymity it offers, bitcoin has become an attractive opportunity the Chinese to hedge against the yuan and skirt rules limiting how much foreign exchange individuals could buy each year.
Both Huobi and OkCoin have recently announced the highly-anticipated start of Ethereum trading on their platforms. The companies noticed the rising demand and growing interest of customers towards the Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. OKCoin has been studying technical maturity, innovation, market liquidity, and compliance of both cryptocurrencies to assess their viability.
“Today, we are formally launching ETH on the OKCoin exchange. Ethereum has a current circulation of 90 million, with ETH reaching a market cap in excess of USD 10 billion, and a total hashrate of more than 25K GB. Hundreds of applications are now built on Ethereum and a growing number of applications are using smart contracts run on the Ethereum blockchain”, OKCoin stated.
As for now, two of three leading exchanges in China have already started Ethereum trading, which can be rather eventful for the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem. As Chinese exchange generate a lot of volume on a daily basis, it is likely that the demand for Ethereum will increase. The cryptocurrency price is growing and now makes up $228.
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