A few more Chinese cryptocurrency news sites are currently unavailable amid the country’s ongoing clampdown on the sector.
Fast facts
- The website of ChainNews, one of China’s largest crypto news websites, was not available as of press time on Thursday. It tweeted on Nov. 15 that the site will be down for eight to 10 hours due to maintenance. It has continued tweeting news and updating its Telegram account.
- The main site of Odaily, another crypto news service, has also been unavailable and was still inaccessible on Thursday. However, it seems to still publish content on an alternative URL that goes with “0daily.com.”
- A source — who preferred anonymity — from a major crypto news site told Forkast.News in September that it had to self-censor its content due to political sensitivity and it was migrating its users from domestic platforms, such as WeChat, to overseas community app Telegram. The source said it saw thousands of new users within a day of setting up its new Telegram group.
- This is not the first time China has seen crypto news portals that go dark. In July, Chinese cryptocurrency news aggregation service Bishijie, or CoinWorld, shuttered its website and app to comply with central bank regulations.
- In June, Weibo blocked more than 30 influential Chinese cryptocurrency-related accounts. Also, the official Weibo accounts of three of the country’s major crypto exchanges — Huobi, OKEx, and Binance — were suspended in March. The trio have also been blocked by Baidu, China’s most heavily used search engine, and its peer Sogo, alongside Quora-like Zhihu.