P2P Exchange Hodl Hodl Sneaks Around China's Google Firewall

On a company blog posting, multi-sig P2P bitcoin exchange Hodl Hodl announced the extension of its services to China.

Hodl Hodl said Google's reCAPTCHA service, used by the exchange and blocked by Chinese firewalls, was to blame.

As part of its on-boarding and trading services, Hodl Hodl uses Google's reCAPTCHA service to identify bots.

By moving off of Google's service in China, Hodl Hodl was able to open up Chinese traders to its platform.

Speaking with CoinDesk, Hodl Hodl team manager Artur said Hodl Hodl has always accepted Chinese traders, the problem came down to China's Great Firewall.

"For the privacy and security of our customers, we don't publicly provide data on P2P trading on our platform, but I can say that there's a huge demand in this country for P2P trading, especially after the biggest centralized exchanges disappeared from radar some time ago."

In May, P2P bitcoin trading site LocalBitcoins blocked Iranian traders from using the platform.

As Iranian traders were cut off from the site, they sought and found alternatives such as Hodl Hodl.

When LocalBitcoins went dark in Iran, Hodl Hodl had just added Farsi language support.

Currently, Hodl Hodl is working on access for U.S. traders, the only country the service does not operate in.