Bybit CEO confirms the exchange’s decision to start serving clients from mainland China

What’s new? Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou confirmed during a stream on platform X on December 3 that users from mainland China can freely trade on the exchange provided they use a VPN. However, he added that Bybit does not intend to open trading in the Chinese yuan. On the PRC mainland, crypto transactions and mining have started to be gradually restricted since 2017 and 2021 respectively.

Source: X.com

What else is known? Earlier this year, Bybit announced that mainland Chinese citizens living abroad would be allowed to trade on the platform. At the time, the team said it considered the risks of such a decision “acceptable” given the high demand.

In June, the exchange allowed for Chinese passports and other identification (KYC), but continued to block attempts to visit the website from IP addresses in mainland China.

Still, Bybit has not recorded a large influx of new users from that part of the PRC. According to Zhou, this was expected given the restrictions on accepting yuan.

“What the Chinese government dislikes the most about crypto is that it can facilitate capital outflow. So we won’t touch this red line,” Zhou explained the exchange’s refusal to accept payments in yuan.

It is worth noting that cryptocurrencies are not banned throughout China. Hong Kong, being a special administrative region of the PRC, has its own regulatory bodies and laws. Since the end of last year, local authorities have started to implement a legislative framework aimed at turning Hong Kong into a regional crypto hub.

Here, crypto exchanges are allowed to serve retail customers subject to a license, and spot funds (ETFs) based on bitcoin and Ethereum are traded on stock exchanges. In addition, the authorities will abolish the tax on crypto profits to attract institutional investors, and the central bank will subsidize the issuance of tokenized bonds for three years.

Bybit is one of the largest centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs), it was founded in 2018 by a team from mainland China but moved the business overseas amid Beijing’s restrictions on the crypto industry. The exchange is currently headquartered in Abu Dhabi.

Bybit is second only to Binance in the CEX ranking in terms of trading volume. In October, the total trading volume on the spot and derivatives markets of Bybit amounted to $763,15 billion, and the exchange’s website was visited by 21,5 million users. Traffic mainly comes from Russia (27%), Ukraine (7%), and South Korea (6%).

Since the beginning of November, against the backdrop of the crypto market rally as a result of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, Bybit’s daily trading volume has jumped by 142,4%: from $4,67 billion to $11,32 billion.

Last week, Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) accused a number of offshore exchanges, including Bybit, KuCoin, Bitcastle, MEXC, and Bitget, of serving local customers without authorization.

Also, in October, analysts at IS firm PeckShield reported that some of the funds obtained by hackers as a result of the EigenLayer protocol hack totaling $5,7 million were transferred to Bybit for the purpose of laundering.