China’s ICO ban makes more sense in light of its history with fintech

Nik MilanovicContributor

Nik Milanovic is a fintech enthusiast and MBA candidate at Insead who previously spent five years at Funding Circle.

More posts by this contributor:

China’s decision to freeze fundraising through initial coin offerings continues to roil markets, but the regulatory decision may not be as controversial as the response from the bitcoin community would lead observers to believe.

On Monday, the People’s Bank of China announced that it was implementing a freeze on fundraising through ICO’s on Chinese exchanges. (Here is the original announcement, for Mandarin speakers.) The move by China’s central bank, which is roughly equivalent to the Fed in the US, looks at first blush to be a blunt response to a nuanced issue.

Many in the US have chided the PBOC for its apparent overreaction. AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant called the policy a “huge gift to Silicon Valley and its resident financiers.” VC Fred Wilson penned a thoughtful post comparing China’s approach to that of the SEC in the US, opining that “We needed a cooling off period and if China’s actions are that cooling off period, then I welcome them. However, a blanket ban on ICOs seems like bad policy to me.”

The news is ultimately, like all things blockchain, speculative. ICO trading has been frozen on exchanges, and exchanges are complying with government demands to offer refunds. The PBOC is mulling freezing bank accounts tied to ICOs. Local regulators have a list of 60 major platforms they plan to inspect. And, in a partial walk-back, “a Chinese official has clarified the position saying that China will look to resume ICOs in the future after establishing licensing regulations.”

So the net status of the ban is:

  1. No one is sure exactly what it means or how it will be applied;

  2. Platforms and investors look generally eager to comply, even in spite of the short-term operational pain; and,

  3. It may be a temporary stopgap measure while the government decides how to regulate cryptocurrencies.

This status creates a lot of uncertainty, but with a government known both for far-reaching measures and for keeping its cards close, that may be by design.

From the perspective of US and European financial markets, this reaction seems like a drastic one-size-fits-all policy for a nuanced ecosystem, calling to mind the idiom “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” However, China’s context provides four specific insights that somewhat reframe this policy:

An ever-evolving financial regulatory regime

In the period following Chairman Mao Zedong’s death leading up to 1989 (when communism began to reform throughout Europe), China went through some of the most important regulatory reforms of the past century. The country implemented its Open Door Policy in 1979, allowing China up to foreign businesses.

China’s private sector grew massively alongside east Asia’s “tiger economies” in the 1990’s, with further reforms in 1998 bolstering private property rights, shutting down government monopolies, and stimulating competition in the global private sector. In perhaps the most important development in its public markets reform, the government greenlit the Shanghai Stock Exchange, which opened up in 1990.

During this growth phase, millions were pulled out of rural poverty, and GDP per capita grew by almost 20x (better than just about any VC multiple.) This astounding rise in the wealth and purchasing power of Chinese citizens created a de novo middle class of investors almost overnight. This middle class, reminiscent of America’s in the roaring 20’s and postwar 50’s, is a ravenous source of global consumption and investment in financial products such as stocks, bonds, alternative finance, and, yes, bitcoin.

But the question of how to regulate speculation and protect middle class investors has not been an easy one to answer for China. As Brookings notes, China’s financial system is “highly opaque and evolving rapidly. Every decade sees major changes in the regulation, structure, and operation of finance in China, consistent with the rapid changes in the nation’s overall economic and political development. Only a few decades ago the private financial sector virtually did not exist.”

The dual goals of any securities regulatory regime are to 1) protect investors (especially unsophisticated, mom-and-pop investors) and 2) avoid deterring innovation. Sometimes these goals are harmonious, but frequently they conflict.

In a country with a stock market less than 30 years old, it’s little wonder that investor protections may not yet have evolved to be comprehensive enough for the complicated ecosystem of alternative finance. Imagine China having to replicate the regulatory framework that took decades to develop in the US following the 1929 stock market crash – all in less than 30 years!

This kind of uncertain environment is perfect for scammers, or what Matt Levine calls “hucksters and hype and bubbles and disaster.” Without organizations like the SEC, CFPB, and FINRA to protect massive nest egg of the Chinese middle class, blanket bans like the PBOC’s on ICOs look somewhat more reasonable as a stop-gap measure to avoid massive fraud and loss.

A sketchy recent past for financial technology in the Middle Kingdom

The fledgling financial regulatory regime in China, married with the growth of fintech over the last 7 years, has created a perfect environment for booms and busts, frauds and scams, and losses for unsophisticated investors.

China’s stock market is dominated by individual investors, who make up close to 85% of traders. Compared to the plurality of ETF’s, hedge funds, and institutional investors the US, the traders on the Shanghai are remarkably new to investment.