OKX announced the removal of 20 privacy coin trading pairs, including Monero, Zcash and Dash

New stops for privacy coins

The OKX exchange has announced in the last few hours the removal of several trading pairs relating to privacy coins, which will therefore no longer be able to be traded starting from the first week of January 2024.

Among these, the most famous Monero, Zcash and Dash, which cover most of the sector, and which would no longer satisfy the listing criteria of the CEX, which in turn, inevitably, must adapt to the regulatory directives of the institutions of surveillance.

Not surprisingly, the reaction on the markets was harsh, with -3.45% for Monero (XMR), -9.58% for Dash (DASH) and -10.9% for Zcash (ZEC). The group of other removed coins includes KSM, FLOW, JST, KNC, ANT, FSN, ZKS, CAPO, CVP and ZEN.

Similarly, the deposits of the latter have also been blocked, while the withdrawal will be permanently suspended on March 5, 2024.

The news profoundly affects the entire sector, not only for the underlying regulatory implications (which could involve other exchanges), but for the share in terms of volumes managed by OKX, which with its 60.27 billion dollars in the last month handles 7.2% of the total market volume.

A regulatory problem

To date, OKX has not provided precise information on the motivation for the choice, but it is easy to imagine that it derives from the regulatory pressure weighing on Cex.

Already in the past, for example, such an initiative had fallen to Binance in Europe, which disabled trading for the aforementioned token class in France.

Moreover, privacy coins have always been in the sights of regulatory authorities, firstly because, by nature, they do not allow the details of transactions and wallet balances to be shown, unlike public blockchains.

In fact, therefore, privacy coins, if on the one hand they protect users from surveillance, on the other hand also attract malicious actors, for money laundering or even terrorist financing.