Is crypto legal in China?

This page is about mainland China. On 6 February 2026, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, the State Administration for Market Regulation, the National Financial Regulatory Administration, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) issued a notice on further preventing and dealing with risks related to virtual currencies (Yinfa [2026] No. 42), with the approval of the State Council. The notice took effect on the day it was published and repealed the 2021 notice on virtual currency trading speculation (Yinfa [2021] No. 237).

The three quotes below come from the copy of the notice on the CSRC’s website. They are in their original language, simplified Chinese. In English, they say the following.

The first says that virtual currencies do not have the same legal status as legal tender. Virtual currencies such as Bitcoin, Ether and Tether are issued by non-monetary authorities, use cryptography and distributed ledgers or similar technology and exist in digital form; they are not legal tender and should not and cannot circulate as money.

The second says that business activities related to virtual currencies are illegal financial activities. Exchanging legal tender for virtual currencies or one virtual currency for another, buying and selling them as a central counterparty, providing information intermediation and pricing services for their trading, token-issuance financing and trading financial products related to virtual currencies in China are, it says, suspected illegal financial activities such as the illegal sale of token vouchers, unauthorised public offerings of securities, illegal securities and futures business and illegal fundraising, and are strictly prohibited and banned. Offshore entities and individuals may not illegally provide virtual-currency services to persons in China in any form.

The third concerns investors: where an entity’s or individual’s investment in virtual currencies, tokenised real-world assets or related financial products violates public order and good morals, the civil legal acts involved are void and the investor bears the resulting losses; where it is suspected of undermining financial order or security, the authorities deal with it under the law.

The notice also covers the tokenisation of real-world assets (RWA) and stablecoins pegged to the renminbi; those parts are not quoted here. No register of crypto platforms is linked on this page: we found none on the websites of the CSRC and SAFE.