HM Treasury changes course on collecting data around unhosted crypto wallets
“There is not good evidence that unhosted wallets present a disproportionate risk of being used in illicit finance,” said the Treasury update. The government of the United Kingdom said it intends to modify a proposal that would have required crypto firms to collect personal data from individuals holding unhosted wallets that were the recipients of digital asset transfers.In its Amendments to the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds updated on Wene, HM Treasury said it will be scaling back its requirements for gathering data from both the senders and recipients of....
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Tentative clampdowns coming from both the Treasury and the House in the United States lead this week's Law Decoded. Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor's noteFor several weeks, rumors have circulated in the United States that the Treasury Department under Steven Mnuchin is planning some sort of rulemaking to ban or severely restrict self-hosted cryptocurrency wallets.The Treasury hasn’t made any public statements to support these rumors, but they are persistent and pervasive enough to be worth paying....
The proposed legislation would require exchanges to verify personal data behind any transaction. Less than a week after a potential ban on Proof-of-Work (PoW) digital assets was dropped from the EU’s prospective MiCA framework, a new threat to the crypto industry could be emerging in the European Union. This time, it is non-custodial, or unhosted, wallets that are in regulators’ crosshairs.On Thursday, March 31, the European Parliament Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs will vote on an anti-money laundering (AML) regulatory package that seeks to revise the current Transfer of Funds....
“Indeed, cash poses a greater challenge to law enforcement than cryptocurrency in unhosted wallets," wrote Judge Zia Faruqui in an opinion on a forfeiture case.
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 earlier today, 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 involve 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 includes and encourage....
President Joe Biden has frozen all agency rulemaking, including former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s controversial proposal on “unhosted wallets,” according to a prominent cryptocurrency lawyer. The story is developing and will be updated.