Taobao, or as people associate to it the eBay of China, has updated its policy by banning everything related to cryptocurrencies. Digital assets themselves, ICOs and any other virtual currency related services as well. This is not the first attempt from the firm, which is a subsidiary of ecommerce giant Alibaba. The platform ranked top 10 by visits according to Alexa and has more than 580 millions users who are either buying or selling various products and services.

Taobao previously has banned the sale of cryptocurrency mining tutorials and sale of miner equipment, but now also anything that is related to blockchains is prohibited. No more ICO consultancy, whitepaper editing, nor smart contact or any other crypto related technical services. New rules are going to be applied from 17th of April.

The reasoning is probably connected to the recent regulatory attempts from People’s Bank of China regarding cryptocurrencies. Last September the PBoC has banned first ICOs, which was not enough apparently, as they banned cryptocurrency trading and foreign exchange early this year. However mining is not prohibited yet luckily as the biggest mining powers are mostly concentrated in China. Rumor says though that miners are already planning the migration of their services as the new legislations regarding mining digital assets would be the next logical step.

Even though these are not good news regarding the Chinese environment for our favorite digital currencies, there is still hope that after a global regulatory framework advancement things could change for the good again even in China. PBoC’s new head Yi Gang expressed that “Bitcoin is a currency that provides freedom to anyone that uses it…”, which means that at least certain individuals are open to progress. Currently only Taobao has banned all Blockchain related services, the Chinese government has not yet made a move. Interesting enough they just backed a freshly launched $1 Billion Blockchain Fund which will focus on investing in Blockchain startups. Moreover, PBoC was the bank that filed the most Blockchain patents in 2017 according to CCN.