EU proposes to ban anonymous crypto wallets
The proposed law aims to promote strict supervision of all digital transactions to avoid money laundering and terrorist financing
Officials of the European Commission recently released a new bill proposing stricter standards for digital currency transactions and wallets, which shows a tightening of regulations for the cryptocurrency sector.
The central objective of the proposal is to stimulate strict supervision of crypto movements as part of a global strategy that allows the enforcement and strengthening of anti-money laundering (AML) and know your client (KYC) standards as well as avoiding “money laundering and terrorist financing.”
According to the proposed requirements, “companies and digital currency service providers must collect more information about the senders and recipients of transactions. Specifically, what is known as the FATF; the Financial Action Task Force travel rule would apply to cryptocurrency transactions to make them traceable.”
In the European Union, the recommendations made by FATF are already being applied to electronic transactions. However, the project proposes to expand the “scope of regulation 2015/847 to include transfers of crypto assets made by crypto asset service providers (CASP), in addition to the current provisions on transfer of funds.”
The bill states: “It aims to reflect in the amendments to EU legislation made in June 2019 to the Recommendation of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on new technologies to cover ‘virtual assets’ and ‘providers of services of virtual assets’. In particular, the new obligations of information for the CASP originators and beneficiaries in the two extremes of a transfer of cryptoassets.”
The proposal also establishes that all organizations that manage virtual assets must handle information on the identification of users since anonymous crypto-asset wallets will be prohibitedby the new law.
M. Rodríguez
Source: ambito.com
