Huobi China Exit Plan: Here’s When the Crypto Exchange Would Shut its Door

Huobi, one of the largest crypto exchanges serving Chinese customers has decided to shut its door on mainland China customers after the recent crackdown guidelines from the People’s Bank of China. The latest crypto ban guidelines prohibit foreign crypto exchanges from offering any services in the country and also threatened local firms from offering any help to these foreign crypto platforms.

Huobi announced it would shut all spot trading services by December 15 while all deposit functions will be disabled by December 14. The CNY deposits will be shut down by December 31st. This makes Huobi the first major crypto exchange to eliminate the Chinese user base.

The Chinese Central Bank last week issued a new set of crypto crackdown guidelines which many called the sternest one till now. The new guidelines instructed authorities to shut all existing crypto mining operations. It also deemed all crypto-related transactions illegal.

Will Other Crypto Exchanges Follow Huobi’s Lead?

Most of the foreign crypto exchanges serving the Chinese customers started disabling new customer registration including OKEx, Huobi, and Binance. However, none of these crypto exchanges have announced a complete shutdown like Huobi.

During the May-June crackdown phase, most of the foreign exchanges disabled their crypto derivatives offerings in the market owing to the regulatory crackdown. However, this time around even though it’s the 19th time that the Chinese government has banned crypto, market insiders beleive this time around it’s different because the ban originated from the current power crisis in China.

The crypto market unlike May-June was not impacted by the crypto ban and only registered a correction of about 5% and has bounced back in double digits with the start of October. The impact of the Chinese ban on the crypto market is slowly gaining and the crypto market has become more resistant to such market FUDs.