HaoBTC Shuts Down Exchange Services

After recent PBOC measures, the Chinese Bitcoin mining company known as HaoBTC is closing the doors on the portion of their business that is their modestly-sized bitcoin exchange. The PBOC’s regulatory requirements are likely to blame for the predictable demise of small exchanges like the one that will cease to operate over at HaoBTC.

The exchange, launched in April 2016, takes less than 0.5 percent of the global bitcoin trading volume on any given day, whereby sources from inside of China state that the decision to shut their exchange is not as harmful as it seems:

In fact, many Chinese Bitcoiners do not even know HaoBTC has exchange functions. They're much more known as a mining pool and online wallet — cnLedger (@cnLedger) February 13, 2017

The ominous, new set of rules that a bitcoin exchange must adhere to has begun to make their business dealings more difficult. For many Chinese cryptocurrency exchanges, this is proving to be too much of a strain, as evidenced in this HaoBTC partial shutdown. HaoBTC made the sudden change to their operation, shutting down their exchange even though at the start of February the company had announced the introduction of new deposit fees for their exchange services.

“We don’t provide margins and futures (trading) now, but we will provide margins in the future. Unlike other Chinese exchanges, like OKCoin and Huobi, our exchange uses the maker/taker model, that means we charge fees on exchanges,” stated HaoBTC Vice President Xiong Yue speaking to CCN in December.

The announcement included news of a large deposit fee to be added to the user’s costs, but even with that substantial fee change, it merely served as a foreshadowing of the soon coming closure.

Additional information about HaoBTC’s exchange reveals that their exchange operation will cease to exist on February 15, with any unfinished business or unfilled orders at the time to be automatically canceled or reversed. RMB deposits will stop altogether on February 17. For now, it looks like all of their other bitcoin services, including the mining pool and online wallet, will continue to operate without delays or changes.