Binance continues to operate in China by reporters

06/09/2020

Lena Dzhess

Binance OTC Platformprovides cryptocurrency trading services to Chinese residents, despite the announcement of the termination of this activity. Decrypt writes about it with reference to the investigation of the state television channel CCTV.

A CCTV reporter found a link to binancezh.com on Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao's Weibo microblog.

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Going to the page, the journalist registeredas an individual investor. According to the publication, he found a tab offering to purchase USDT, BTC and other digital assets for the national currency. On the page for buying bitcoin, a list of various sellers appeared, indicating prices, limits and various payment instruments:

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After clicking on the "Buy BTC" button, the system redirected the user to the page for verification using an identity document and a camera.

The journalist reportedly transferred the money to the seller through a third-party payment instrument and received a notification from the system about the execution of the corresponding application.

Commenting on the investigation, Binance representatives stated that their application and the binance.com website are not available for use in the PRC.

Binancezh website.com with the same interface as the main trading platform, according to them, is a test one. According to SimilarWeb, over 79% of visits come from China, 8% from Egypt, 5% from the United States, just over 1% from Hong Kong and less than 1% from the Philippines.

A day earlier, Chinese law enforcementfroze assets in bank accounts of “thousands” of OTC cryptocurrency traders and their clients over money laundering allegations. The ban on trading cryptocurrencies in China has been in effect since 2017.

In May, Binance registered the domain name binance.cn with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China. The company will be engaged in "development and commercialization of blockchain technology."

In November 2019, The Block announced the closure of Binance's Shanghai office following a police raid. Zhao denied this information and threatened the publication with legal proceedings.