It's unfortunate that another surviving platform which protects privacy has to bid goodbye, although it's consoling to read that just as a door closed a window has also opened. I'm excited for Haven and Serai and others to achieve success.
The popular exchange used to trade Monero...
And Bitcoin, too.
They're not even US based so that have no obligation to report to the IRS or DOJ.
This is just FUD at its finest.
On the flip side, with the new IRS taxing rules, I would not be surprised if we finally see "the third wave of private exchanges".
It only takes a single American citizen to use a platform registered, licensed, headquartered, hosted, whatever based overseas for it to be answerable to the US.
FTX was based outside the US. So is Binance. Samourai is also hosted far from the US. Chipmixer was also operated outside the US. There were many others. They were all seized, fined, indicted, whatever by the US.
This was quick and I don't know how the US government could scare them off, especially since services like LocalMonero/Agoradesk cannot be classified as money laundering services or used to launder large amounts of cryptocurrencies without being noticed.
It could easily be labeled as such by a simple statement from the DOJ or whatever US agency.