Taobao Updated Their Policy Banning Cryptocurrencies

Commonly known as the eBay of China, Taobao has restructured their policy putting a ban on cryptocurrencies, ICOs, and other virtual currency-related services.

Established in 2003, Taobao is a subsidiary of Chinese eCommerce Giant Alibaba which allows individuals and small businesses to list their items for sale within China.

Earlier on, Taobao had put a ban on the sale of Cryptocurrency Miners and providing Mining Tutorials. Furthermore, they have gone a step forward to ban any product or service that utilizes Blockchain.

According to the new policy, cryptocurrency related services including ICO Consultancy, White Paper Writing Services, smart contract deployment services and another crypto related technical services have been restricted. Also included in the ban is the sale of blockchain based virtual assets such as CryptoKitties and their several duplicates. This new policy will come into effect today.

Taobao mentioned previous bans from People’s Bank of China as a motivation for the ban. Last year, in September, PBoC made a ban on all ICOs and earlier this year, Cryptocurrencies itself were totally banned. Although mining operations are yet to be banned, the majority of miners are planning to move to other countries that are cryptocurrency friendly.

According to Taobao, going against these policies is a great crime and there is serious consequence attached breaking the rules. Following the ICOs bans by the PBoC last year, numerous advertisers were able to bypass the ban by changing the spellings. For instance, they posted ICO as IC0, changing the ‘O’ to ‘0’ (zero).

Even though China is not friendly to cryptocurrencies, several traders are hopeful that there will be a change of decision. According to PBoC’s new head Yi Gang, “Bitcoin is a currency that provides freedom to anyone that uses it.” Although Taobao had prohibited all Blockchain related services, Blockchain in China is yet to be banned.