The news was released on January 9th, so it is official, Derbit, a Dutch-based cryptocurrency exchange, will move its headquarters to Panama on February 10th; the reason, of course, is the introduction of the new European anti-money laundering legislation which, once it becomes operational, will be so rigid as to discourage any player, even those who do not deal with exchange platforms, to abandon the eurozone.
In recent weeks, for example, we have explained how a company historically active in the EU in the gaming market has decided to close its doors for the same reason, the new anti-money laundering rules, in practice, place such important burdens on companies for adapt to compliance to make the activity substantially uneconomic.
In any case, the regulatory framework at the global level, at this moment, is particularly unstable, also thanks to the initiative taken by the FATF (international financial action group) which has targeted the crypto-anonymous companies by inducing many exchange platforms, for now mainly on the Asian markets, to proceed with numerous delistings which have also affected decidedly significant currencies such as, for example, monero.
While the EU is preparing to pass new rules that risk killing the crypto asset industry in the bud, the USA, although showing less rigidity, is quite swaying, so much so that currently it is difficult for any observer to understand what turn things will take; even the congress seems split, with part of the policy that, aware of the risk posed by bitcoin for the hegemony of the dollar, would like to put in place all the necessary actions to try to completely sink the market, while countries, such as China, Russia, Iran, which would also have an interest in supporting bitcoin, still shows enormous distrust of decentralized currencies.
Net of all this, however, Europe is certainly the one that shows the greatest rigidity, as well as the one that has lagged behind everyone in regulating the market in a decent way; while Japan, China and South Korea have a state-of-the-art regulatory framework which, albeit with some rigidity, has allowed the birth of a fairly varied cryptocurrency industry, the exact same thing that happened in the USA, here in Europe they do not seem there are not even the minimum conditions necessary to operate and the few players in the EU are either closing their doors or considering the possibility of moving their registered office abroad.
A mistake, that of the technocrats of Brussels, that the 25 euro area countries will pay dearly, in the form of a technological gap that will be increasingly difficult to bridge compared to those countries which, while not fully clearing cryptocurrencies, have however demonstrated less rigidity.
