- You can trade Bitcoin and altcoins in China on crypto exchanges like Binance, OKX
- The Chinese government cracked down on the real estate sector, prices tanked
More and more Chinese investors are buying Bitcoin and other cryptos, believing they are safer than China’s plummeting stock and property market assets, Reuters reported.
Finance executive Dylan Run started buying cryptocurrencies in early 2023. As the Chinese government had banned Bitcoin trading and mining in 2021, he got cards from small rural banks and began to buy cryptocurrencies on the grey market. To evade attention, he set a limit of 50,000 yuan ($7,000) per transaction. He compares Bitcoin to gold.
At the moment, Run holds crypto worth a million yuan, comprising around 50% of his investment portfolio. His equities are just 40%.
How to trade Bitcoin in China
You can trade Bitcoin and altcoins on Binance, OKX, and other crypto exchanges as well as through over-the-counter channels. Investors in mainland China can buy crypto via overseas bank accounts.
Hong Kong allows digital assets, which motivated many Chinese citizens to transfer funds into Hong Kong crypto accounts using their $50,000 annual forex purchase quotas. However, they can only use the money to travel or for education under Chinese rules.
Traditional investments are risky, disappointing
The Chinese government cracked down on the real estate sector over the past three years, which killed property prices. Real estate was traditionally the backbone of household investment portfolios.
China's economic crisis made investments disappointing and risky, which is why many Chinese are moving assets offshore, according to a Hong Kong-based crypto exchange executive who wished to remain anonymous.
Traditional financial institutions want a piece of the pie too. The Hong Kong subsidiaries of ChinaAMC, Bank of China, and Harvest Fund Management Co are all looking into opportunities to deal in digital assets.
Crypto is flourishing despite the ban
According to data from crypto analyst Chainalysis, China’s global ranking in crypto peer-to-peer trading volume went up from 144th in 2022 to 13th in 2023. Despite the ban, the raw transaction volume of the Chinese crypto market was $86.4 billion between July 2022 and June 2023, compared to $64 billion in Hong Kong. Large retail transactions ($10,000-$1 million) were around 7% of the total last year, nearly twice the global average.
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