The rumor started circulating on social media since yesterday, but it is probable that the problem has already existed for at least a month, the fact is that the Chinese government has blocked access to one of the most popular ethereum explorers; to what we learn, therefore, etherscan.io is no longer reachable from geolocated IP addresses in mainland China. CoinDesk reports that the analysis of GreatFire.Org, a site that monitors and processes the list of sites censored by China, reveals that until the end of August last year the site was still reachable, the block is estimated to have started from 30 Last October; currently, therefore, etherscan is reachable only by Chinese users who have a vpn, all the others are cut off. In any case, it is not the first time that China has blocked a website, only until now to be targeted by censorship were sites of an informative nature or that in any case can have a function of this type, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit , is instead the first absolute case of an explorer blockchain that is blocked in China. Matthew Graham, CEO of the blockchain investment company Sino Global Capital, intervened on the matter, declaring that:

This is a typical case of friction between decentralized technology and a strongly centralized government like China; We would do well to expect further problems like this in the future as the blockchain is further integrated into the Chinese economy and into everyday life

At present it is not yet known what triggered the blockage, the fact is that it is rumored that last year some users tried to circumvent Chinese censorship by coding some articles in such a way that they could be shared via the web and then spread the hash of those transactions through WeChat and circulate the link; this could therefore be the reason for the blockade decided by the Chinese government, however on this, for now, there are no certainties given that even Matthew Tan, founder and CEO of etherscan, said he had noticed the blockade in the last 3 months but that only he cannot provide an exact date as to when this block was imposed but he is not even aware of the real reasons for which it was decided. For now the question has been resolved by cloning the site in order to make it available, through another domain not yet blocked, to Chinese users, after all it is unthinkable that the government will be able to block all accesses to an explorer in the country for which the battle of the government to impose censorship is already lost from the start, moreover if this technology is defined as "incensurable" a reason must also be there.