Binance starts accepting fiat via Alipay, WeChat

The move follows an announcement made in September 2019, concerning the exchange’s intention to add over-the-counter (OTC) trade options for an additional fiat on-ramp. According to a Twitter post, the exchange CEO announced that Binance is not working directly with WeChat or Alipay. However, users are able to use them in P2P transactions for payment.

One of the largest social media apps globally, WeChat currently has over 1.1 billion active users according to Statista. Payment application Alipay has over 900 million users as well, per the China Daily. Since the 2017 banning of cryptocurrency exchanges by the People’s Bank of China (PoBC), P2P trading has predominated in China. Earlier in 2019, CoinDesk reported that P2P exchange Hodl Hodl had reconfigured its security preferences to sidestep China’s Great Firewall.