After the fairly resent ban of the cryptocurrency transactions by the People’s Bank of China, three largest and most influential exchanges in the country – BTCC, Huobi, and OKCoin — have moved overseas, to Hong Kong.
Since the September crackdown on cryptocurrency trading, these platforms seem to be doing just fine, servicing the Asian markets and expanding their reach. Most of the serious investors have moved with the exchanges in order to circumvent the set of restrictions imposed by the Chinese government.
A few of the exchanges intend to launch peer-to-peer bitcoin trading and introduce trading bitcoin with fiat currencies. Over the counter trading or moving off-shore seems to be the way of the future, at least while the ban persists. And as Zeng Danhua puts it in a recent interview:
The regulators may have needed to shut the platforms to guard against financial risks, and there may be a bitcoin bubble, but its investment value persists.
So, regardless of the regulations, investors will continue to look for the way to trade cryptocurrency and related assets, which bodes well for the platforms that are willing to enable this.