Chinese regulatory bans are causing mass exoduses - from WeChat to Telegram, exchanges to LocalBitcoins and maybe soon China to Hong Kong.
As news comes that a full Bitcoin-to-fiat exchange ban may come into effect Sept. 30, China’s crypto users and businesses are feeling the heat.
Hong Kong the winner
Already, Hong Kong based exchange platform Gatecoin CEO Aurelien Menant says, requests for listings from mainland entities are up sharply.
“We have received a high number of inquiries from Blockchain project founders based in the mainland who would like to list their tokens on our exchange,” he told the South China Morning Post today.
“Since last Friday, with the rumors of a possible tightening on the regulation of exchanges in the mainland, we have experienced a surge in the number of Chinese clients registering on our platform.”
Hong Kong has signaled it will fall in line with the US when it comes to ICO token regulation, contrasting with China itself.
At the same time, panic appears to be setting in among traders anxious about government snooping. WeChat, China’s vast social network, is seeing a rare emptying of users as they migrate to anonymous platform Telegram to talk crypto.
New laws placing responsibility for group chat users’ words on administrators is compounding the phenomenon, Bloomberg reports.
LocalBitcoins
“If you are a group chat leader you have two choices, either you are going to super actively monitor the group, because your livelihood is at stake or you’re going to delete the group,” a Hong Kong academic explained about the new status quo.
Frantic international reactions to price volatility are meanwhile bringing big rewards to certain industry sectors such as p2p trading platform LocalBitcoins.
Cointelegraph has already reported on the increasing returns of Chinese users since fears of an exchange ban first appeared. LocalBitcoins data for this week will become available Saturday via Coin Dance.