The planned changes to the law are likely to have less dramatic effects on the crypto industry than previously feared.
The US Treasury Department has presented its new bill to regulate financial services, which would prohibit US-registered crypto exchanges from interacting with self-managed crypto wallets
In a corresponding announcement on Friday evening, the Department for Combating Financial Crime (FinCEN) presented the planned changes to the law that would force crypto exchanges to “obtain and confirm the identity of their customers if the counterparty involved in a transaction uses a self-managed wallet and the transaction is greater than $ 3,000 „.
Initially, this is only a draft, with the Ministry of Finance giving all parties who would be affected by such a law 15 days to comment
The first rumors of such a bill had already surfaced last month . The outgoing Finance Minister Steven Mnuchin was accused of wanting to significantly influence crypto regulation before the end of his term in office. In the announcement he writes:
“This bill addresses some aspects of the digital currency market that pose a threat to our national security. We want to close these security loopholes that attackers could misuse for their own purposes.“
However, several influential politicians have already spoken out against the bill, which many see as a fundamental attack on peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions. However, since there is no explicit legal regulation for these, the Ministry of Finance has great influence here.
However, the bill is far less bad than many feared beforehand. Rather, existing regulations for transactions, which concern the collection of customer information from US $ 3,000, would only be extended to all registered crypto companies that interact with self-managed wallets.
