Skip to main content

Averted a year ago, controversial transaction monitoring rule is back on Treasury’s radar

The Treasury will consider imposing KYC regulations on transactions involving self-custodied wallets.

As the Department of the Treasury has announced its regulatory agenda for the fiscal year on Jan. 31, many in the Web3 space have likely experienced flashbacks to December 2020, when the agency had first proposed to impose Know Your Customer, or KYC, rules on transactions that involved self-custodied crypto wallets.

The Treasury’s semiannual agenda and regulatory plan, a document that is meant to inform the public of the department’s ongoing rulemaking activities and encourages public feedback, features a clause entitled “Requirements for certain transactions involving convertible virtual currency or digital assets.”

Ascribed to the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, it proposes to require banks and money service businesses to “submit reports, keep records and verify the identity of customers” in relation to transactions with funds held in unhosted wallets.

In FinCEN parlance, unhosted (also known as self-hosted) wallets are those that are not controlled by an intermediary financial institution or service. Users of such wallets “interact with a virtual currency system directly and have independent control over the transmission of the value.”

The rule proposed in December 2020 would have required registered cryptocurrency exchanges to collect personal details of their customers transacting with an unhosted wallet if the value of the transaction exceeded $3,000. A person sending funds from an exchange account to their private wallet would fall within the scope of the rule.

Introduced in the waning days of Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin’s tenure, the rule was scrapped amid massive pushback from the industry.

At the time, Mnuchin said that the rule addressed “substantial national security concerns” associated with the cryptocurrency market. The resurgence of the agency’s focus on the self-hosted wallets measure could have to do with the “crypto as a national security threat” focus of the executive order that the Biden administration is reportedly preparing.

Still, mentioning a rule on the Treasury’s semiannual agenda does not mean that it will necessarily be adopted.



from https://ift.tt/ruqMoO9az
https://ift.tt/LbVquca8n

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Five Bitcoin Price Charts Analyzing The Dramatic Q1 2022 Conclusion

There are only hours remaining until the Q1 2022 close in Bitcoin price action. With the important quarterly candle set to close tonight, let’s look at what technicals might say about the direction of the next quarter. Q1 2022 Comes To A Close For Bitcoin The first quarter of a year, often sets the tone for the year to come. In investments, a poor Q1 performance is indicative of a bad year ahead. Considering the fact that Bitcoin price is now above $45,000 after touching $32,000 this quarter, it is tough to say the performance has been “poor” by anything other than crypto standards. Related Reading | Bitcoin Weekly Momentum Flips Bullish For First Time In 2022 The cryptocurrency has recovered nearly 40% from the low, leaving a long wick behind. Such a long wick suggests that before the quarter came to a close, buyers stepped up in a major way. Buyers were able to step up in a larger capacity in Q1 2022 than bears were able to in the final quarter of last year. The bearish wick to cl...

ENS DAO delegates offer perspective on DAO governance and decentralized identity

AlphaWallet CEO and Spruce co-founder talk about their roles as contributors to the Ethereum Name Service following the project's recent airdrop. Earlier this month, the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, formed a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, for the ENS community.  Cointelegraph spoke to two ENS DAO delegates who applied for the opportunity to represent the community and stay involved in the decision making process: Victor Zhang, CEO of AlphaWallet, an open source Ethereum wallet, and Gregory Rocco, co-founder of Spruce, a decentralized ID and data toolkit for developers. Zhang spoke about his experience as an external contributor to ENS and an early supporter since 2018. Zhang initially sought to help ENS by offering Alpha Wallet as a user-friendly tool for  resolving .eth names and cryptocurrency wallet addresses. Essentially, if a user inputs an .eth name in the AlphaWallet, it will show the wallet address, and vice versa using reverse resolution. Alpha...

FTX hacker reportedly transfers a portion of stolen funds to OKX after using Bitcoin mixer

On-chain activity suggests that the hacker has sent at least 225 BTC (4.5 million) to OKX so far. Hackers who drained FTX and FTX USA of over $450 million worth of assets just moments after the doomed crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, continue to move assets around in an attempt to launder the money.  A crypto analyst who goes by ZachXBT on Twitter alleged that the FTX hackers have transferred a portion of the stolen funds to the OKX exchange, after using the Bitcoin mixer ChipMixer. The analyst reported that at least 225 BTC — worth $4.1 million USD — has been sent to OKX so far.  1/ Myself and @bax1337 spent this past weekend looking into the FTX attacker’s deposits to ChipMixer. It appears they’ve likely been transferring a portion of the stolen FTX funds to OKX after withdrawing from CM So far we’ve accounted for at least $4.1m (255 BTC) sent to OKX pic.twitter.com/C46JZWtktn — ZachXBT (@zachxbt) November 29, 2022 According to ZachXBT, the FTX h...