Binance to halt cryptocurrency trades using Chinese currency

With Beijing cracking down on cryptocurrency mining and trading, Binance, the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, said it will stop allowing trades involving the yuan in peer-to-peer trading after this year, the Wall Street Journal reports. From then on, any of the platform's users found to be based in mainland China will only be allowed to close or withdraw their positions. Bitcoin (BTC-USD) falls 3.7% to $55.2K. The Chinese government has been tightening its grip on a range of tech businesses in the past year, but it has outlawed cryptocurrency all together. In 2017, it banned cryptocurrency exchanges from operating within the country. Recently, its central bank declared crypto-related transactions as illicit. The WSJ reports that Binance has said people in China haven't been able to access the website since 2017. After China's new rules were announced, the exchange said it started blocking account registrations using Chinese cellphone numbers.