China’s central bank warned several of its largest state-owned banks and Jack Ma’s Alipay to “investigate and identify” bank accounts facilitating cryptocurrency trading and block all corresponding transactions, in Beijing’s latest move against Bitcoin.  

The central bank on Monday said it had called in the Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank, and ICBC, as well as other payment platforms like Alipay, to discuss the problem of “providing services for cryptocurrency transaction speculation”.

The regulator called on the financial groups to identify and block all transfers to accounts held by cryptocurrency exchanges and other offshore middlemen as well as to invest in technology to ferret out any transactions linked to “cryptocurrency speculation”.