Jack Liu, the head of international division at the OKCoin bitcoin exchange, has discussed with Bloomberg's Angie Lau the perspectives bitcoin brings to China.

Mr Liu believes that even though bitcoin prices have recently seen a meltdown, the interest towards the cryptocurrency grows rapidly, with huge investments being made and the developers focusing more “on how to solve consumers' problems”.

He explained that what excites the entrepreneurs the most is the open decentralised ledger technology, by means of which “for the first time in finance any two people can make a transaction with each other free and instant”.

Jack Liu positively assessed the step undertaken by CFTC, which declared bitcoin a commodity. He added that, given that some of the world's leading transmittance systems, such as PayPal and Alipay, are not interconnected, such bitcoin platforms as Superwallet, launched by OKCoin in April, can become a panacea.

“I'll give you an example. Like, a Chinese student using Alipay in China can't send [money] to his friend in the US using PayPal, because the two systems are closed. But imagine the new system where OKLink is your China wallet, you have CNY in the app, which is our app. And then we've seen our industry peers in the United States such as Coinbase and Circle launching an equivalent which accepts US dollars. So that Chinese transactions happen over bitcoin network, which means it's free and instant, and it's just like an email which you send from Yahoo to Hotmail,” said Lio.

According to OKCoin representative, China already has a huge e-commerce market, and what the industry is working on at the moment is trying to harmonize current financial system with the new outstanding possibilities that bitcoin gives.

The interview comes after the rumours about the Chinese auto giant Wanxiang Group’s plans to invest $50 million into the blockchain industry.

Maria Rudina