Despite Ban in China, Crypto Traders Are Still Active on Binance’s Exchange: State-Media Report

A recent report by China National Radio (CNR), a state-run media, has revealed that Binance is still operational in the country. This is despite its exit back in 2017 amidst the crypto ban by Chinese authorities, a move which saw most firms close shop. According to the report, Binance exchange can be accessed by the Chinese community through a website domain dubbed ‘binancezh.com'.

The news surfaced after a China Central Television (CCTV) reporter based in Beijing successfully registered on Binance and acquired some BTC through its P2P service. Prior to this, Binance had posted on its Weibo (China's Twitter) a number of updates including the binancezh.com link. Notably, ‘zh' is a short version of Zhongwen; the translation of ‘Chinese' in mandarin.

The report goes on to highlight that it was through the link shared on Weibo that they were able to register an ‘individual' account with Binance. Interestingly, the I.D verification process was pretty seamless despite adding Beijing as the location address of the account holder. In addition, they were able to complete a face verification via the Binance mobile app. This was then followed by the actual BTC purchase facilitated by a third-party payment provider.

Binance Defense

Source: Similarweb – binancezh.com Traffic

Following this development, CCTV questioned Binance to get clarity on its operating position in China. The exchange has since responded by saying that the binancezh.com website is a test site with most participants based in Egypt. While Amazon's Alexa concurs with this statistic, data from similarweb shows that close to 80% of the website's traffic (estimated at 1.03 million visitors per month) comes from China.

Nonetheless, Binance seems to be making a gradual comeback in Chinese market after leaving about three years ago. The firm recently got an approval for a Chinese domain ‘binance.cn' and is now looking to expand its tech and education to China's market. Furthermore, it had launched a research initiative under Binance Academy to accelerate growth in the same market.