China orders banks to intensify anti-crypto campaign

China orders banks to intensify anti-crypto campaign

China's central bank warned several of its largest state-owned banks and Jack Ma's Alipay to "investigate and identify“ bank accounts facilitating cryptocurrency trading and block all corresponding transactions, in Beijing's latest move against Bitcoin.

The central bank on Monday said it had called in the Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank, and ICBC, as well as other payment platforms like Alipay, to discuss the problem of "providing services for cryptocurrency transaction speculation“.

The regulator called on the financial groups to identify and block all transfers to accounts held by cryptocurrency exchanges and other offshore middlemen as well as to invest in technology to ferret out any transactions linked to "cryptocurrency speculation“.

The order is part of a recent Chinese government crackdown on cryptocurrencies that began in May, as Beijing seeks to end trading and shut down the world's biggest crypto-mining operations, which lie within its borders. Instead, the central bank wants citizens to use its own digital currency, which it has started testing in large-scale pilots.

While Chinese authorities took the first steps to ban banks from handling Bitcoin transactions as far back as 2013, and have launched several crackdowns since, they have been unable to stamp out cryptocurrency trading entirely. Industry insiders