Shanghai Man: Looking deeper into China’s biggest ban yet

This weekly roundup of news from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong attempts to curate the industrys most important news, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations.

Well, it finally happened. The regulation-driven crypto-apocalypse in China. They started by clamping down on miners earlier this summer before finally tightening the screws on exchanges. This week, the final nail in the coffin came with even more rules from the PBoC that resulted in many platforms announcing they could no longer accept Chinese users.

Banned yet again

The new a massive spike in adoption for the StarkWare-based derivatives platform. According to data on Similarweb, China was the top region to access the site, with over 10% of the market share. Users with VPNs from China likely accounted for even more. It’s still not clear if this will be a long-term solution, or if the massive increase is more speculative in search of earning the DYDX token as a reward.

Toeing the party line

Seeing an opportunity to display their best behavior, eCommerce platform Alibaba announced the platform could no longer be used for the sale of cryptocurrency mining machines. This stance is not surprising, considering the scrutiny the company is already under by financial regulators. The organization is being restructured after their p2p lending models sparked a high-profile row between founder Jack Ma and financial oversight bodies.