Chinese mobile-payment giants Alipay and WeChat Pay have both reiterated their stance on banning crypto-assets trading, after news broke that crypto exchange Binance has enabled peer-to-peer trading against the Chinese yuan.
Binance, one of the world’s largest digital currency exchanges, announced Wednesday that it had launched a peer-to-peer trading function that would allow the transaction of mainstream cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether against the yuan.
Binance CEO Zhao Changpeng later said in a tweet that the exchange now offers Alipay and WeChat Pay for trading in China, after a user discovered the development and posted a screenshot on Twitter.
Alipay’s refutation arrived soon, with an all-cap “NO” to the tweet. China’s largest mobile wallet owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba said it 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 payment services,” it said.
To allay users’ confusion, WeChat, Tencent’s mobile-payment system, also made a stern statement that it doesn’t support any type of crypto-assets trading and has never integrated any crypto merchants into its platform, local media outlet SinaTech reported.