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Mainland China maintains a blanket prohibition on crypto exchange, trading, and related intermediary/financing services, originally declared illegal by the 15 September 2021 ten-agency Notice and now carried forward and extended by the February 2026 eight-agency joint notice, which per T3 legal-advisory reporting supersedes the 2021 instrument as the sole operative primary framework. No onshore licensing or registration pathway exists for these activities.
No registration, licensing, or authorization pathway exists onshore for crypto exchange or related intermediary activity; the regime is best characterized as a blanket prohibition rather than a permissive-but-restricted licensing regime. The People's Bank of China remains the lead supervisory authority driving this prohibition, with the National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Public Security and State Administration of Foreign Exchange operating as co-signatories with distinct enforcement remits (industrial-policy/mining, public-security enforcement, and foreign-exchange/cross-border control respectively).
The entire evidentiary basis for this module's claims -- both the underlying 2021 prohibition and its February 2026 reassertion and extension -- rests on T4 secondary news reporting (CoinDesk, The Block); no primary-source PBOC or joint-agency text has been directly retrieved and verified against an official .gov.cn portal this cycle. Confidence on both the 2021 Notice's declaration of illegality and the 2026 notice's reassertion has accordingly been held at Probable, downgraded from an initial Confirmed rating, reflecting the systemic absence of T1-T3 corroboration across nearly all binding claims in this jurisdiction this cycle. The exact calendar date of the February 2026 notice is itself an approximation (2026-02-06) drawn from secondary reporting that described the notice's issuance only as occurring on "Friday."
Outlook
The trajectory here is unambiguously tightening: the February 2026 notice both reaffirms and materially broadens the scope of the standing prohibition, rather than signaling any move toward a licensing pathway. The most consequential near-term research task is direct primary-source retrieval of the February 2026 joint notice text from an official .gov.cn portal, which would both confirm the exact promulgation date and allow sourcing to be upgraded above T4 for this module's core claims. Until that verification occurs, this module's claims should be read as resting on a well-corroborated but exclusively secondary evidentiary base, with the 2021-to-2026 supersession relationship itself now confirmed by independent T3 legal-advisory sources even though the underlying regulatory text remains unretrieved in primary form.
Crypto Licensing
China's crypto-licensing landscape remains one of comprehensive prohibition rather than any form of licensing regime. PBOC-led Notice Yin Fa [2026] No.42 restates this prohibition, covering onshore cryptocurrency exchange, trading and related financial-services activity, all treated as illegal financial activities. The notice's most significant lifecycle event is procedural rather than substantive in the narrow sense: it expressly repeals the 2021 virtual-currency prohibition circular (Yin Fa [2021] No.237), consolidating what had been the operative legal basis for the prohibition into a single new instrument that also broadens scope. This repeal-and-restate pattern means the underlying prohibition itself is not new, but its legal basis, and its explicit coverage of instruments that did not exist or were not clearly addressed in 2021, principally RMB-pegged stablecoins and RWA tokenization, is materially updated.
Both the prohibition claim and the repeal claim are assessed at Probable confidence, reflecting that this cycle's evidence base rests on law-firm and trade-press secondary commentary (Lexology, CryptoSlate) rather than a directly-retrieved PBOC primary text. The gaps register for this cycle flags an open question as to whether the seed-listed pbc.gov.cn/en URL remains the correct live host for the full text of Notice No.42, or whether it has moved to a dedicated notice page, an open sourcing question rather than a substantive doubt about the notice's existence or effect.
Outlook
Retrieval of a Tier-1 PBOC primary text for Notice No.42 remains the single most consequential open item for this module; until that occurs, confidence in the specific scope and wording of the restated prohibition is capped at Probable notwithstanding consistent secondary-source corroboration.
2 earlier distinct update(s)
Crypto Licensing
Notice Yin Fa [2026] No.42, effective 6 February 2026, reaffirms and extends China's comprehensive prohibition on virtual-currency-related business activity. The notice declares exchange services, central-counterparty trading, pricing services, token-issuance financing and derivatives all illegal financial activities in mainland China (CLM-CN-001). This is a Confirmed, Tier-1-sourced finding directly from the People's Bank of China. The notice expressly repeals the 2021 PBOC-led virtual-currency trading-speculation notice that preceded it, an architecture-level instrument replacement rather than an incremental amendment (CLM-CN-002), though this repeal claim itself rests on Tier-3 secondary sourcing rather than a directly quoted primary repeal clause.
No licensing pathway exists, or is contemplated, for domestic virtual-currency exchange, trading or token-issuance activity under this framework. The instrument's approach is prohibition, not licensing-with-conditions; there is no application process, no fit-and-proper test, and no compliance pathway by which a domestic or foreign entity could lawfully operate an exchange, trading platform or token-issuance business onshore.
Outlook
The most significant open question is whether any enforcement action materialises against an entity attempting to exploit ambiguity at the margins of the notice's scope — for instance, an entity structuring activity as something other than 'exchange' or 'trading' in form while achieving the same substantive effect. No such action has been reported this cycle; the notice's practical deterrent effect remains, for now, an architecture-level inference rather than an enforcement-tested one.
Crypto Licensing
China's licensing posture for virtual-currency business activity remains what it has been since 2021: a blanket prohibition rather than a licensing regime, now reaffirmed and re-issued under a fresh instrument. PBOC's Circular Yin Fa [2026] No. 42 explicitly states that all virtual-currency-related business activities constitute illegal financial activities in mainland China, and reporting describes this circular as repealing and replacing the 2021 circular that previously carried this designation. There is no indication in this cycle's research of any carve-out, sandbox, or conditional-licensing pathway being introduced alongside the reaffirmation; the instrument's function is to consolidate and restate the prohibition under new cover rather than to soften or refine it. What makes this cycle material for the licensing module specifically is less the restatement of the domestic ban -- which is, on its own, an unchanged fact -- and more the fact that the same instrument extends the prohibition's practical reach to categories (stablecoins, real-world-asset tokenization, and outbound service provision to Chinese entities) that previously sat only within the general prohibition's broad language rather than being named explicitly. The supervisory authority remains PBOC, acting through a formal internal circular rather than through a public law or regulation subject to separate legislative process, which is itself a structural feature of how Chinese financial-sector prohibitions of this kind have historically been issued and amended. The primary sourcing for the core prohibition claim sits at a mid-tier level (T3, trade press), with the extension provisions corroborated at a stronger tier through a Library of Congress legal-monitor summary; the underlying Chinese-language circular text itself has not been independently retrieved this cycle, which the monitor is treating as an open verification item rather than as grounds to discount the substance of the reporting.
Outlook
No change to the licensing module's fundamental character is anticipated absent a change in Beijing's underlying policy stance, which this cycle's research gives no indication of shifting. The most likely source of further material development in this module going forward is not a loosening of the prohibition but continued specification of its reach -- further named categories, further extraterritorial provisions, or enforcement actions taken under the new circular's authority. Independent retrieval of the primary Chinese-language text remains the single highest-value verification step outstanding for this module, since it would allow the monitor to move from reporting-based corroboration to primary-source confirmation of the exact scope of the 2026 restatement relative to the 2021 instrument it replaces.
Sources and findings (2)
- T4 · CoinDeskPeople's Bank of China (PBOC)-led ten-agency Notice — Virtual currency exchange, token-to-token exchange, and related intermediary and financing services are illegal financial activities in mainland China (15 September 2021 Notice).retrieved M5bindingin forceupdated
- T4 · CoinDeskEight-agency joint notice (PBOC, CSRC, NDRC, MPS, SAFE et al.) — The February 2026 joint notice reasserted the 2021 ban on crypto trading and stablecoins, including cross-border activity, and imposed strict controls on RWA tokenization with only limited exceptions.retrieved M5bindingin forceupdated