The post Empire Newsletter: Privacy coins sacrificed so crypto could run appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Rest in Privacy The world tends to move slowly on crypto regulation — but the cumulative effect on investor bags can be huge. Privacy coins are, on the surface, a case in point. Rolling bans and delistings over the past six years have placed some of the largest projects on the outs. The European Union’s Markets in Crypto Assets Act (MiCA) framework, which came into effect last year but will be enforced at the end of 2024, is really a capstone on the governmental anti-privacy coin movement.  Authorities have gone after developers of privacy protocols Tornado Cash, Samourai Wallet and Blender — including arrests and a prison sentence. Regulators and other agencies have instead targeted privacy coins at the business layer. MiCA outright bars crypto service providers (which includes exchanges and other payment services) from having anything to do with privacy unless the holders can be identified. The same goes for credit and financial institutions. That has been enough for crypto exchanges operating in the EU to largely drop cryptocurrencies tied to protocols with built-in privacy features. Binance delisted monero earlier this year, having initially pledged to restrict trading in EU countries last year before walking that statement back two weeks later.  OKX dropped a number of privacy coins when it delisted nearly two dozen tokens in December, while Kraken will stop supporting them in Ireland and Belgium next week, after suspending trade and deposits in May. Such delistings carry on from moves made by crypto platforms including Coinbase UK and Shapeshift going right back to 2018. Other avenues for acquiring privacy coins are drying up alongside their trading volumes. LocalMonero — a platform for selling XMR peer-to-peer without providing identification — announced it was shutting down in May, having operated for almost seven years. Privacy coin dominance has, perhaps…

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Filed under: News - @ June 7, 2024 6:18 pm