The Great Chinese Firewall, used by the authorities to regulate access to foreign sites, blocked etherscan.io, one of the most popular services for viewing the statistics of the Ethereum network.

According to CoinDesk, as of early December, the portal is not accessible from IP addresses in mainland China. According to the service greatfire.org, blocking has been carried out at least since October 30.

Presumably this is the first time that a blockchain observer has become a target for Internet censorship in China.

This is another instance of friction between the decentralized and immutable technology of blockchain and the tightly controlled, centralized government of China. We should expect additional problems like these in the future as blockchain is integrated further into the Chinese economy and daily life.
 

Matthew Graham

CEO, Sino Global Capital

In his opinion, we should expect similar problems in the future, since the blockchain is increasingly being integrated into the Chinese economy.

It is not known exactly what caused etherscan.io to become blocked.

Last year, it was reported that users encoded censored articles in an Ethereum transaction and shared the hashes of these transactions in the WeChat messenger using etherscan.io.

Some have used this feature to post sensitive messages without the need to worry about the message being blocked or removed, or their identity being exposed. Anyone with a blockchain explorer like Etherscan can view these messages, so it is not surprising that this website has come in the crosshairs of internet censors.
 

Matthew Graham

CEO, Sino Global Capital

The founder of etherscan.io, Matthew Tan, confirmed that the site in China has been blocked "for the past three months." He could not name the exact date and reason for what happened.