Cryptocurrency exchanges Huobi and Binance have stopped letting traders use mainland China mobile numbers to register new accounts
Context & Ripple Effects
The registration restriction extends a retreat already visible in July, when Huobi and OKCoin moved to close their Beijing subsidiaries amid China’s widening crackdown. It also follows the earlier Beijing-directed halt of bitcoin exchange trading, which established that local exchange access could be curtailed through compliance action.
For Binance and Huobi, mobile-number verification is a customer-onboarding control, so excluding mainland China numbers narrows a practical route for new mainland users even where the exchanges operate beyond China.
First-order effects
- Binance and Huobi immediately lose the ability to onboard new accounts using mainland China phone numbers, while prospective mainland users must seek exchanges or access routes that do not rely on that registration method.
- Huobi’s China-facing footprint contracts further after its Beijing subsidiary closure, making the company’s local compliance posture more restrictive than a corporate-office exit alone.
Second-order effects
- Other exchanges serving Chinese-language customers face pressure to review phone-based onboarding and identity checks, because a mainland-number ban by two prominent platforms raises the compliance cost of continuing to accept them.
- Registration controls shift competition away from straightforward mainland-user acquisition toward platforms and services able to operate with less direct exposure to China-based onboarding.
Third-order effects
- The sequence—from trading halts to local subsidiary closures and now account-registration restrictions—points to crypto access being constrained through multiple operational layers rather than a single market-wide shutdown.
- If exchanges continue to treat mainland identifiers as a compliance boundary, China’s crypto market will become increasingly separated from the customer-acquisition systems used by global trading platforms.
The trend: China’s crypto crackdown is driving exchanges to turn compliance requirements into product-level limits on who can enter their platforms.