What about all these rumors that privacy coins will be delisted from big exchanges? Was Monero or another known privacy coin affected, delisted?
Because of these rumors, Litecoin team started to rethink their strategy to implement a privacy solution to LTC.
Is this true or just FUD? If this is nothing more as a FUD, then whois behind it? Why only privacy coins are targeted?
I haven't heard anything about delistings of privacy coins from exchanges or even of plans to do so and that is why I ask you for a second opinion.
See my comment below.
There is no Korea ban, see my comment below (especially bolded part). Additionally, Bithumb (a Korean exchange) as well as Huobi Korea still have Monero listed.
Pasting my reddit comment:
The FATF guidance does not even prevent privacy coins from being listed on an exchange, as long as the exchange enforces KYC/AML for the users.
I ascribe the recent events to an overzealous and erroneous interpretation of the guidance by the compliance department of the exchange in question. It further should be noted that, for instance, Binance and Kraken still cater to Korean users. Additionally, see a relevant comment of mine below:
My response to the following article: OKEx Korea delisting all privacy coins, including Monero, Zcash and Dash, as these ‘violate’ FATF’s 'travel rule' - The Block
as these ‘violate’ FATF’s 'travel rule'
I don't think this is the case actually. As long as they enforce KYC/AML for each account, they should be able to tie deposits and withdrawals to a certain person. In addition, they can send this information to another service (which is essentially what the travel rule is about) in case a direct withdrawal (i.e. a withdrawal to another service) is made.
People should also bear in mind that FATF merely makes recommendations:Importantly, FATF doesn't have *any* regulatory authority of its own. FATF makes recommendations, not laws.
Member countries can adopt all, some, or none of FATF's recommendations. There are basically no repercussions for not adopting (or for violating) FATF recommendations.
The U.S. based exchanges will most likely follow FinCEN's guidanceAs you might expect, the United States doesn't really like having its regulatory policy dictated to it by other countries.
FinCEN (the US regulator in charge of AML/CFT regulation) certainly does consider FATF's recommendations, but rarely adopts them wholesale.
Which was positive for privacy coins:
People often like to purport that Monero will inevitably get banned. However, the new FinCEN guidance is basically inconsistent with that notion. From the CoinCenter article:
Section 4.5.3 states that exchanges are not per se banned from using privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies but will need to comply with the same BSA regulations they comply with for typical cryptocurrencies. We believe that this is possible. Exchanges need to know their customers but they do not have a black letter law requirement to know the customers of their customers. In other words, a bank needs to know who you are but they are not obligated to know the name and address of people that you pay using cash you withdraw from your account.
https://coincenter.org/entry/fincen-s-new-cryptocurrency-guidance-matches-coin-center-recommendationsThe full twitter thread on FATF's guidance can be read here:
https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1142578858589347840EDIT: To add a few more things:
[1] Monero is private by default and optionally transparent. There are plenty of tools available in Monero that allow one to be compliant with an auditor.
https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/auditing[2] Tari Labs is working on an open source framework for listing Monero.
https://twitter.com/fluffypony/status/1172832896727638017[3] CoinCenter confirmed in the MoneroKon regulatory panel that almost all exchanges are already mostly compliant with the FATF guidance (because they enforce KYC/AML for each user).
[4] Monero is listed on a lot of U.S. based regulated exchages, services, and OTC desks. I made an overview here:
https://np.reddit.com/r/xmrtrader/comments/c1zkfu/daily_discussion_tuesday_june_18th/ergqhzs/[5] This only concerns *Korean* users of OKEx.
This subject was also extensively discussed in yesterday's Monero Coffee Chat. I highly recommend watching it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y0YeTLbYE
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