Bybit, a cryptocurrency exchange with Chinese roots that is now one of the world’s largest by trading volume, said mainland Chinese users are free to trade on the platform if connected through a virtual private network (VPN), but it will not allow trading in yuan.
Bybit announced earlier this year that mainland Chinese citizens would be allowed to trade on its platform overseas because so many users urged it to do so, and because the company felt that the risks were “acceptable”, co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou said in a media briefing on Tuesday. However, the platform does not intend to accept China’s currency.
“What the Chinese government dislikes the most about crypto is that it can facilitate capital outflow,” Zhou said. “So we won’t touch this red line.”
The company in June began letting people sign up with mainland Chinese identity documents, including national IDs and passports, although it still blocks mainland IP addresses.
The move was meant to attract the “overseas Chinese community”, the company said at the time, but Zhou noted on Tuesday that this also means people currently living on the mainland can trade on the platform by connecting to a VPN, which uses an IP address in another jurisdiction.
Still, Bybit has not seen a lot of new users from mainland China, according to Zhou, who said the company expected this given its restrictions on accepting yuan.
Bybit, which was founded in 2018 with a focus on derivative products, is among the major crypto exchanges that was started by a mainland Chinese team but later exited the market during Beijing’s industry crackdown.
The Chinese government, while allowing the special administrative region of Hong Kong to develop the crypto industry, maintains a strict ban on commercial crypto activity on the mainland, including trading and mining.
Bybit’s platform has grown rapidly in recent years, moving quickly to fill a void left by the collapse of FTX, started by one-time industry icon Sam Bankman-Fried, now serving a 25-year prison sentence in the US for fraud.
Its 24-hour trading volume on Wednesday made Bybit the third largest crypto exchange in the world, far behind the global leader Binance but ahead of the largest US exchange, Coinbase, according to CoinGecko.
The number of registered users on Bybit tripled from 20 million last year to nearly 60 million this year, the company said on Tuesday.
The exchange briefly sought a licence in Hong Kong this year under the new mandatory regulatory regime that took effect in the city last year. It submitted the application in January, only to withdraw it in May.