On Thursday (October 10), Chinese payment platform Alipay, reaffirmed its negative stance on the use of its payment service for crypto-related transactions.

Alipay, which is a leader in mobile and online payments, was established in China in 2004 by Alibaba Group, and currently has over a billion users. Like Apple Pay, WeChat Pay and PayPal, it “overlays traditional card payment methods.”

On October 9, Binance announced the launch of a P2P crypto trading service, with support for trading BTC, ETH and USDT against CNY (Chinese Yuan), and said that this feature will initially be available only in China and it would be accessible via the Android version of the Binance mobile app.

Later, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (aka “CZ”) confirmed on Twitter that users of the app could use Alipay or WeChat Pay to make fiat payments for these trades:

Some confusion by some news outlets. @Binance is not working directly with WeChat or Alipay. However, users are able to use them in P2P transactions for payment. Still not a small feat. But words/meaning get twisted as they are passed around. https://t.co/uQ8KmD1TQB — CZ Binance (@cz_binance) October 9, 2019

Now, however, it seems that Alipay has heard about this and wants its users in China to know that paying for crypto on its platform is still prohibited.

As the tweet below by Dovey Wan (a Founding Partner of Primitive Ventures) shows, the Alipay Security Center communicated this message earlier today (October 10) on Weibo:

Alipay officially reaffirmed its “Prohibition of cryptocurrency OTC trading” on its Weibo today (auto translation below) Starting from Aug, China OTC market has been slowing down quite a bit due to various actions taken by both payment channels and local police pic.twitter.com/z3ZqzyJpvn — Dovey Wan 🗝 🦖 (@DoveyWan) October 10, 2019

Not to be outdone, just as we were about to publish this article, WeChat Pay made a similar announcement, as you can see from the following tweet by Wan:

wechat pay also followed up with an announcement to reassure “wechat will never support cryptocurrencies trading, and has never integrated with any crypto merchant And it says “we welcome any whistle blower to report such behavior” 🤯🤯🤯 pic.twitter.com/Kj4HTupkKZ — Dovey Wan 🗝 🦖 (@DoveyWan) October 10, 2019

Featured Image Courtesy of Alipay