Bitcoin Banned by Alibaba’s Taobao After China Tightens Rules

January 12, 2014 Leave a comment

Bitcoin Banned by Alibaba’s Taobao After China Tightens Rules

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., China’s largest e-commerce website, will ban the sale of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies after the country’s central bank tightened regulations in December.Taobao Marketplace, one of the main platforms that link buyers and sellers on Alibaba, will bar from Jan. 14 the sale of Bitcoin and related products, including mining software and hardware for the virtual currency, the company said on its website yesterday.

China’s central bank stopped financial institutions from handling Bitcoin transactions after the virtual currency’s value jumped 89-fold. Alibaba’s move to ban the sale of virtual currencies and related products will help protect users, according to the company.

None of Alibaba’s platforms have accepted Bitcoin as a payment method in the past, and the company’s Alipay payment affiliate doesn’t support websites that use Bitcoin, Florence Shih, a spokeswoman for Alibaba in Hong Kong, said by e-mail.

“Alibaba’s new rules might be a result of recent central bank regulations and concerns about risks associated with Bitcoin,” Wang Weidong, an analyst at Shanghai-based Internet consultant IResearch, said by phone today. “The changes will have quite a big impact on Bitcoin trading in China.”

A number of third-party payment systems have also stopped processing transactions for Bitcoin purchases. Payment provider YeePay gave notice last month to BTC China, the largest Bitcoin exchange in the country, that it could no longer provide payment services. TenPay, a payment provider owned by Tencent Holdings Ltd. (700), also halted service with the exchange.

Users can now buy vouchers from resellers recommended by BTC China, which will be credited into their accounts with the exchange for Bitcoin trading, according to the company’s website.

To contact the reporter on this story: Lulu Yilun Chen in Hong Kong at ychen447@bloomberg.net

Filed under Macro Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment