Alipay Moves Away From Cryptocurrency As China’s Clampdown Increases
Ant Financial, a subsidiary of Alibaba, is the parent company of Alipay. Its valuation expanded to $150 billion before 2018, in the wake of securing a huge $10 billion funding round. Alipay has dominated the Chinese payment market, accumulating 90 percent of the piece of the overall industry. With such extensive size and market share of the overall industry, Chinese government unquestionably realizes that the services of Alipay would be utilized by a crypto fan to trade digital currencies and it is trusted that the regulators need to cut it.
Beijing News, a media outlet administrated by the Communist Party, detailed Friday that Ant Financial is reinforcing endeavors to screen both merchant and customer accounts, and additionally eminent sites that incorporate the Alipay gateway to encourage over-the-counter (OTC) crypto trading.
For a long time, Alipay and Jack Ma, the founder, and chairman of Alibaba has communicated idealism towards digital currency and blockchain technology. Despite the fact that Ma portrayed Bitcoin to have bubble-like qualities, Ma underlined that digital currencies as consensus currencies and blockchain-based distributed frameworks will accomplish huge mainstream adoption later on.
A spokesperson from Ant Financial was quoted by media saying
“Alipay adheres to the principle of not providing services for virtual currency transactions,” adding: “We have been and will continue to closely monitor over-the-counter trading activities. If we find any transactions that we suspect are related to virtual currencies, we take appropriate measures including, but not limited to suspension of related fund transfers and permanently restricting payment collection functions of accounts involved.”
In February 2018, Alipay was pressured to eliminate cryptocurrency traders from its network indirectly, when the government of China asked all banks and financial service providers to ban Bitcoin trading accounts.
“To prevent financial risks, China will step up measures to remove any onshore or offshore platforms related to virtual currency trading or ICOs,” said an article published on Sunday night by Financial News, a publication affiliated to the People’s Bank of China (PBOC).
Over recent hours, China has for all intents and purposes clampdown the whole crypto industry in the nation. After China restricted every single commercial event including ones related to with digital currencies, it has gone ahead and has blocked in excess of 124 abroad crypto exchanges that are putting forth trading services to Chinese residents. A tweet acknowledged by the Korean Cryptocurrency and Blockchain News that mentioned, additionally says Fiat payment channels will be exceedingly monitored apart from Communication channels and Exchange blocks.
