Strict EU Crypto Regulations Will Take Effect In January 2020

Strict EU crypto regulations will be enforced in January 2020 as the crypto companies and services that are based in the European Union have less than 30 days to adjust their business operations to comply with the new rules as reported in the previous crypto news. As of January 10^th, the fifth Anti-money laundering directive will go into effect requiring KYC and monitoring transactions.

The regulators across the world have a hard time putting cryptocurrencies within a certain legislative network and the EU is on its way to put in effect an updated legislation version named the 5^th anti-money laundering directive. Among the biggest changes, there are those which require crypto service providers to conduct know-your-customer checks on their own. All of the transactions get monitored and the companies have to file suspicious activity reports with law enforcement included.

The Strict EU crypto regulations are an outcome from the updated legislation in 2018 where all of the members had 18 months to adjust their businesses accordingly. Time is running out and if the services fail to comply with these requests, the will have to pay fines and penalties or even get shut down. 5AMLD will affect the most popular crypto exchanges that are based in the EU including Bibox, Coindeal, OKEx, Binance, and bitstamp. If these companies leave the EU, they will have to comply totally.

It is also worth noting that the United States also imposed similar measures back in 2013 and the European Union seems to be catching up. Besides the rules mentioned above regarding the crypto services, the legislation will require public access to information on the owners of any firm. The primary goal is to help against potential illicit activities such as money laundering. According to Judith Sargentini, these measures will provide bigger transparency and will help the EU fight against losing billions of euros:

 “Annually, we lose billions of euros to money laundering, terrorism financing, tax evasion, and avoidance – money that should go to fund our hospitals, schools, and infrastructure. With this new legislation, we introduce together measures, widening the duty of financial entities to undertake customer due diligence. This will shine a light on those who hide behind companies and trust and keep our financial systems clean. These rules will also be of enormous benefit to developing countries and their fight against illicit outflows of money which is desperately needed for investment in their own societies.”

The post appeared first on DC Forecasts