China’s Central Bank Issues Public Notice Warning Investors Against ICOs and Crypto Trading
China’s central bank has recently issued a new public notice asking its citizens to stay away from trading in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and cryptocurrency trading. Despite introducing a blanket ban last year, these warnings and reminder continue to come from the Chinese authorities in a timely manner.
The Shanghai branch of People’s Bank of China (PBoC) reminded all the investors to increase their risk awareness towards speculative trading in cryptocurrency assets. The central bank also asked investors to stay aware regarding any unregulated fundraising methods like ICOs, promising unrealistic returns.
In the latest notice, the central bank lauded its decision of last year’s blanket ban saying: “The global share of domestic virtual currency transactions has dropped from the initial 90% to less than 5%, effectively avoiding the virtual currency bubble caused by skyrocketing global virtual currency prices in the second half of last year in China’s financial market. The impact has been highly recognized by the community.”
Despite choking several routes for its investors to participate in the crypto market, the PBoC last month admitted that offshore exchange managed to lure local investors. In August, WorldCoinIndex reported how 124 offshore cryptocurrency exchanges were taken down by Chinese authorities by blocking their IP address.
In addition to this, the Chinese authorities also targeted several media communication channels while charging them of creating hype among the Chinese investors.
The People’s Bank of China said that it will “closely monitor ICOs and its multiple variants, strengthen research and judgement, proactively fight and prevent concerns.” It added: “In addition, it [the internet authority] has also strengthened the disposal of domestic ICO and virtual currency transaction related websites, public numbers, social media etc., and permanently blocked some public numbers suspected of releasing ICO and virtual currency trading hype information.”
China big tech giants having global presence like Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and others have also supported the authorities’ decisions by taking sufficient measures in this regard.