Kraken to delist Monero in Belgium, Ireland

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Starting from June 10, Kraken will remove the privacy cryptocurrency Monero from its listing in response to EU regulations aimed at preventing money laundering in Belgium and Ireland in accordance with the anti-money laundering rules.

Kraken notified users that Monero (XMR) deposit and trading activities will be temporarily halted starting May 10. However, they can still withdraw their XMR funds until the cut-off date of June 10. It’s recommended for customers to settle any open margin or leveraged positions before this suspension takes effect.

XMR showed little response to recent news, with its price barely changing by 0.6% over the past day and holding steady near $133 based on information from CoinMarketCap.

Starting from June 10, Kraken will prevent Monero withdrawals and swap all stored Monero into Bitcoin (BTC) for users based in Belgium and Ireland. This decision follows Kraken’s global removal of Monero from its trading platform back in February.

In January, the company attached tracking devices to certain cryptocurrencies like Monero (XMR). Additionally, other popular crypto platforms, such as Binance and OKX, removed Monero from their lists of tradeable assets.

Kraken’s Monero support cracks under EU regulations

Kraken recently announced that it will no longer support Monero (XMR) in Belgium and Ireland, following new anti-money laundering (AML) policies implemented by the European Union last month. At first, some members of the cryptocurrency community mistakenly believed that the EU was attempting to prohibit self-managed digital wallets or crypto transactions altogether.

Nevertheless, Patrick Hansen, EU Strategy and Policy Director at Circle, pointed out that the latest anti-money laundering (AML) rules prevent cryptocurrency service providers from providing privacy coins and enabling merchants to receive payments in tokens such as Monero (XMR).

Over the next few days, I’ll add more thoughts on this topic and I don’t support the AMLR. However, disregard the alarmist rumors circulating around.

— Patrick Hansen (@paddi_hansen) March 23, 2024

In a similar vein, the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation views privacy coins as illicit. The MiCA legislation was passed last June and is set to take effect by December. Europe’s upcoming Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations, on the other hand, are predicted to come into force around mid-2027.

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2024-04-11 18:42