Chinese cryptocurrency news aggregation service Bishijie has shuttered its website and app in China to comply with central bank regulations, making it the latest casualty of China’s continuing crackdown on the crypto industry.
Bishijie, whose name translates as “coin world”, announced the suspension of its services last night on its website, saying that in order to comply with cryptocurrency-related regulations published by the People’s Bank of China, and to “actively cooperate with regulators,” it would be “taking corrective measures as required.”
Bishijie provided all kinds of crypto-related information, including news and market prices, and it launched a crypto community forum for investors. According to its own advertising, its app had more than 40 million users.
When Forkast.News checked Bishijie’s website today, it was still accessible to mainland Chinese users, but all the industry information had been deleted, and only the announcement of the suspension remained on its homepage. The crypto community forum page was still available, but nothing had been updated since the announcement was made at 9 p.m. local time yesterday.
According to business information platform Crunchbase, Bishijie was set up in 2017 in Beijing, and raised capital in three rounds of fundraising from investors including FREES FUND and ZhenFund. Its founder and controller is named as Chenhui Tan.
Local media outlets reported that Bishijie had been aiming to expand to the North American and South Korean markets. Hong Kong-registered company CoinNess is believed to be its sole branch outside mainland China. CoinNess’s website said in 2017: “CoinNess’s Chinese version, Bishijie.com, has been launched”.
CoinNess’s site has English- and Korean-language versions that provide crypto news and market information. The English version stopped updating at 9:30 p.m. yesterday, but the Korean version appears to be operating normally. Forkast.News contacted both Bishijie and CoinNess for comment, but had received no reply by press time.
The suspension of Bishijie’s website comes as China continues to crack down on the crypto industry in a campaign that has focused not only on crypto mining and trading, but also on crypto information sources.
On July 6, the Beijing office of the People’s Bank of China published a notice warning that institutions in its jurisdiction were not allowed to provide services such as operational venues, commercial displays, marketing or payment channels for business activities related to cryptocurrencies.
In early June, more than 30 influential Chinese cryptocurrency-related Weibo accounts were blocked. Some of the blocked accounts offered crypto trading information and analysis of the crypto market’s performance, and promoted crypto projects.
Danny Park contributed to this report.