New Barriers: What Opposed The Crypto Market Development This Summer
Summer was hot in terms of crypto regulations and prohibitions — starting with FATF which has released guidelines for regulators, making hints for them to slowly tighten the grip. The regulators didn’t hesitate and started putting the frameworks of control around crypto industry.
“I recognize the need for crypto regulation to deter money laundering and terrorist financing activities from proliferating, but implementing FATF guidelines needs to be done very strategically to not spur the growth of a deepening black market of transactions. I expect to see select, highly-public crypto companies to be made examples of as companies not in compliance with the guidelines to push the greater market to adopt greater standards. As the world's first public blockchain which allows anonymous transactions in smart contracts, our team at Quras sees a vast opportunity in digital ID adoption for compliance with regulations while still protecting sensitive personal and corporate data. At the end of the day, a combination of proper education and greater communication between regulators and blockchain innovators are necessary to help our industry mature in a sensible and effective way.”
However, all these events will not be able to have any serious impact on the cryptocurrency market, says Artur IBRAGIMOV, lawyer at Prifinance company. The new FATF standards are only advisory. Secondly, much of what is said in the FATF recommendations has long been put into practice already:
“I would not call what happened restrictive measures. The G20 only supported the previously issued FATF recommendations regarding the fight against money laundering. For example, one of the recommendations is that now exchanges should collect information about their users and provide it. In practice, all major exchanges have long introduced mandatory user identification. The storage and processing of information has long been regulated under the GDPR.”
What’s more annoying, the crypto industry once again suffered from market players.
Heather DIAZ, fTLD director of compliance and policy stated the following:
“As the financial services arena has evolved, particularly as it relates to fintechs offering financial products/services (e.g., P2P payment providers, cryptocurrency companies), we have found that some prospective Registrants were seeking domains to enhance their legitimacy to market to regulated entities and/or consumers.”
Diaz also said the registry has never accepted a crypto company’s application for a .bank domain name, which costs approximately $1,000 to host per year. Included in this freeze are P2P payment providers, money transfer businesses, and microloan providers.
Long earlier, in February 2014, Apple had removed all the bitcoin wallets from the App Store. After the wallet ban, Blockchain.com wrote a blog post which denounced Apple’s choice to remove the wallet application:
“These actions by Apple once again demonstrate the anti-competitive and capricious nature of the App Store policies that are clearly focused on preserving Apple’s monopoly on payments rather than based on any consideration of the needs and desires of their users.”
Image courtesy of Dailyhive