The Canadian authority has published new guidelines to regulate the activity of cryptocurrency exchanges, thus making them fall under the umbrella of the law that regulates securities; the new directives, published yesterday, specify that regardless of the registered office of the platform, all exchanges that offered cryptocurrency trading services to citizens residing in Canada will be subject to securities legislation.

This, understandably, has raised some alarm in the country, if only because many digital currencies offer potential voting or dividend rights to their owners, which, according to the Canadian authorities' line of thought, would make them comparable to securities .

The Canadian authorities also advised the exchanges to turn to a lawyer, thus showing that this time they are serious and that they will go down heavily; for now, the news has not yet spread widely in the community, but there is no doubt that it will be discussed and much more.

All this clearly shows how important it is, at this stage, to make decentralized exchanges increasingly accessible and easy to use, as they are the only ones that can hope to evade the government cleaver; Centralized exchanges, like practically all the major exchange platforms, can be easily affected by the judicial process, which instead cannot happen when there is no corporate structure.

That in Canada it was starting to blow a bad air, in any case, it had been intuited for a while, for example for the crusade started by the mayor of Vancouver against bitcoin ATMs, guilty in his opinion of facilitating money laundering, without obviously that he presented no concrete evidence to support his thesis; mind you, cases where bitcoin ATMs have been used by criminals to launder money there have been many, but from here to generalize claiming that all these devices have the only purpose of laundering and there is not much.

Waiting to understand how the main exchange platforms will react to this news, therefore, we can only hypothesize that there are only two roads, so either limit access to citizens residing in Canada or take on all the obligations, with consequent economic burdens, which Canadian securities law imposes.