Huobi Global to shut down existing accounts in mainland China

One of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges has announced it will close all user accounts in mainland China by the end of the year.

Huobi Global said it decided to take the step only a days after Beijing issued a blanket ban on all cryptocurrency trading and mining.

Du Jun, Huobi Group co-founder stated: “On the very day we saw the notice, we started to take corrective measures.”

Following the announcement, its native cryptocurrency Huobi Token (HT) plunged to an eight-month low. At the time of writing, the cryptocurrency was changing hands for around $7.62 – a drop of 17%.

Henri Arslanian, PricewaterhouseCooper’s (PwC) crypto leader and partner said he was unsurprised.

“This time there is no ambiguity,” Arslanian said.

“Crypto transactions and crypto services of all kinds are banned in China. No room for discussion. No grey area.”

Good times for DeFi

DeFi coins have greatly benefited from the latest Chinese crypto ban. However, Chinese coins have suffered.

Coins such as DXDY, Uniswap (UNI), and IDEX became the big winners.

Chinese blockchain journalist Colin Wu said Chinese crypto trading groups already started discussing possible alternatives, with centralised exchange FTX apparently coming under consideration.

OKEx is one of the few exchanges still working in China

Amid this crush, numerous Chinese crypto companies have been fleeing the country during the last few months. One of them is Babel Finance – a Chinese crypto financial services provider – which has now moved its headquarters to Singapore.

Cobo, a crypto asset management and custodian platform, also recently moved the same move.

Binance also decided to suspend new mainland China user registration through Chinese mobile phone numbers.

On the other hand, OKEx, another major crypto exchange that serves Chinese users, has not yet made any announcement about account suspension in China.

Mati Greenspan, founder of Quantum Economics, humorously noticed that “if you would have bought $1,000 worth of Bitcoin every time China banned it, you’d be a millionaire by now”.