In recent days, both the EU and Taiwan have moved towards tighter regulation for cryptocurrencies.
The European Parliament voted on Thursday to support the European Council’s December 2017 proposal to bring in new measures to combat illegal use of digital currencies such as money laundering and financing terrorism. This policy, maintains the EU, will reduce anonymity with future cryptocurrency practices.
Under the new measures cryptocurrency exchanges, platforms and wallet providers will now have to be registered with authorities and provide customer verification. The new directive will be legalized three days after publication by the Official Journal of the European Union, then member states will have 18 months to bring the new rules in under the 27 nations’ national laws.
Dutch Green MEP Judith Sargentini argued that billions of euros were lost annually to criminal activity including tax evasion, suggesting that these funds should fund hospitals, schools, and infrastructure:
“With this new legislation, we introduce tougher measures, widening the duty of financial entities to undertake customer due diligence.”
In similar news, The Taiwan Central News Agency has reported that the country’s minister of justice, Chui Tai-san, has said that Taiwan plans to have its new money-laundering legislation in place by November. According to this news report, Taiwanese banks have ordered its regulator, FSC, to identify bank accounts offered to Bitcoin trading platforms as “high-risk clients”. This will require transactions through the accounts above a certain threshold to be flagged to the regulator.
These new measures follow statements last month By Yang Chin-long, Governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of China (Taiwan) when he suggested that cryptocurrencies were under the microscope by the country’s lawmakers, recommending that Bitcoin needed regulating under the country’s existing money laundering laws.
These recent moves to tighten legislation surrounding the use of cryptocurrencies by both the EU and Taiwan are in line with a general shift towards global digital currency regulation.
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