Bitcoin needs to come under regulation to avoid bubble

BTCC co-founder and CEO Bobby Lee believes that China's immensely popular cryptocurrency bitcoin will come under regulation in future.
The announcement by Lee comes after PBoC launched an investigation on BTCC, China's largest bitcoin exchange, along with other leading bitcoin exchanges like Huboi and OkCoin, in the aftermath of the immense price hike in bitcoin at the end of December 2016 and beginning of January 2017.

"The answer is, I don't know when it will happen but I know it will happen. I have confidence of that because fundamentally I think bitcoin exchanges need to be regulated," said Lee to Business Insider.

Bitcoin has exploded in popularity in China over the last 3 years and now accounts for an estimated 99% of all trade in the cryptocurrency.

"Bitcoin regulation may not have been on their agenda for 2017, but given the price spike in early January, it became an emergency topic," Lee says. "They’ve seen the price go up a lot. They want to make sure the price doesn’t go crazy, create a bubble, and hurt a lot of investors. They’re a little bit unhappy with how the price goes up too much so they’ve been giving us some scrutiny."

In a precedent interview with CNBC, Lee declared the price of the digital currency can reach up to $7,000 if it scales over its previous all-time high. 

The investigation started after these three leading bitcoin exchanges came under the scanner for deciding to charge trading fees from January 24, 2017. BTCC, Huboi and OKCoin stated on their separate websites that they will be charging 0.2% per transaction, this fee they believe will "further curb market manipulation and extreme volatility."

The BBC estimated last year that as much of 70% of bitcoin mining is now done in China.