As the latest response to the regulatory pressure, Haobtc plans to remove “trading” feature and shutdown of CNY deposit on Monday. Bitkan also chose to stay low by suspending verification of new OTC traders. Chinese traders are seeking genuine bitcoin trade price.

Haobtc released a statement Monday:

in order to formulate bitcoin industrial AML standard and upgrade the AML system of platform, Haobtc will remove the built-in “trading platform” from wallet and no longer accept CNY deposit. Other applications of the site like wallets, mining pools and hashing are not affected. Users may transfer the balance from exchange account to the wallet account by 15th Feb otherwise the transfer will be conducted via system automatically after 16th Feb.



Market price dropped around 30 USD but slowly recovered a little from the hit. 8btc contacted haobtc but received no comments so far. However, Jiang Zhuo’er , offers opinion from an insider’s standing:

To cope with regulatory pressure, Haobtc first introduced 5% fee on all CNY deposit in order to deter MMM players. It turns out that MMM traders don’t care the mere 5% fee and they find Haobtc the only exchange they can withdraw coins instantly. Another option for haobtc is to split the exchange accounts from the wallet accounts and forbid cross-account transfer. But this option will leave the exchange with 3M users and forex traders, aka the trouble-makers.

So the best option is to shut down the exchange completely.

Haobtc evolves from a wallet and mining pool service provider into an infant stage of exchange. The decision to shutdown exchange will be a great step backward. However it maybe a wise move to protect the integrity of wallet, the foothold in the ecosystem. Earlier today, Haobtc tweets to confirm the reason:

“The decision to close our Exchange is obviously NOT at the behest of PBOC. We are about to do this because HaoBTC is fundamentally a Wallet. Therefore, when the Exchange became a potential risk to the Wallet, we have to close it to make sure that our Wallet is perfectly safe.”

Meanwhile, Bitkan also announced the suspension of verifying new OTC traders.

OTC market in China is weak in the past few years as it has no advantage over the services of exchanges in terms of orderbook liquidity, convenience and security. There are not much OTC options at the moment. CNY trade on localbitcoins is booming . Bitpie qq group now has 538 members and newbies keep on asking how to trade and withdraw. Bitpie features onchain p2p exchange based on multisig technology. Bitcoinworld is even less known to the public. Some even have developed a wechat chatbot to facilitate trading.



There are other more discreet channels for OTC trade like wechat group or qq group to entertain wholesale dealers. It’s said that OTC had around 30 USD premium against exchange price, which, however, could not be confirmed. It seems that the general traders have already lost track of authentic bitcoin price during the transition period.