Alipay, the mobile payment giant has shamed Binance with the reiteration of their ban on cryptocurrency transactions.
It all began when Binance announced they would be accepting payment for Alipay and Wechat on October 8th. The founder of Binance, Changoeng Zhao, said “yes” on Twitter when a user asked if they can use Wechat and Alipay on Binance.
After this, Alipay was forced to take to Twitter to set the record straight and replied to Zhao’s tweet saying, “NO, you cannot.”
After this, they put a link to their main tweet on the issue, which said:
“There’re several reports about @Alipay being used for bitcoin transactions. To reiterate, Alipay closely monitors over-the-counter transactions to identify irregular behavior, and ensure compliance with relevant regulations. If any transactions are identified as being related to bitcoin or other virtual currencies, @Alipay immediately stops the relevant payment services.”
A little later, Wechat also responded. Dovey Wan quoted the post from Weibo, with her tweet saying:
“wechat pay also followed up with an announcement to reassure “wechat will never support cryptocurrencies trading and has never integrated with any crypto merchant. And it says “we welcome any whistleblower to report such behavior””
Changpeng Zhao had to put some clarity on his comments but that did not stop the embarrassing tweet from Alipay and Wechat. He said that Wechat and Alipay were not officially working with the two mobile payment giants and that instead of buying crypto with the sites, you can instead do peer to peer transactions.
The move from Alipay reiterates an increasing pressure from authorities in China. According to Dovey Wan, the police are cracking down on over the counter trading (OTC) and it seems that Alipay has seen this and looked to distance themselves from Binance. Her tweet read:
It is clear that this is yet another PR disaster for Binance and Zhao. The rejection and a frim one at that from Alipay is very telling. Maybe the Chinese market is not available for Binance or others?
However, a willing Chinese public and developments in the industry suggest otherwise. Binance on its peer to peer network for Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and Tether (USDT) has put it alongside the Chinese yuan (CNY) meaning there is another outlet for Chinse nationals looking to get into trading.
