Monero Compliance Workshop: XMR Not A Subject To Funds Travel Rule

The Monero compliance workshop explained that the XMR network will not fall under the guidelines by the US Financial Crimes and Enforcement Network (FinCEN) guidelines regarding the Funds travel rule as we are reading further in the Monero news today.

According to the blog post, the Funds Travel Rule requires the financial institutions who are sending funds or receiving them, to store and transmit valuable information about the transfer especially if it’s valued at more than $3,000 or the equivalent amount. In the 2019 guidelines the FinCEN stated:

 “If a given transmission protocol is unable to accommodate such information, the obligated person may provide such information in a message different from the transmittal order itself.”

This only suggests that there is actually no need to transmit this information on-chain. The regulated anti-money laundering and know your customer compliant exchange should have the required transactional information that is probably storing it. In their statements, the Monero Compliance Workshop concluded that the funds travel rule does not apply only to Monero but to any other cryptocurrency. The workgroup noted:

 “It would appear to be inappropriate to state that any cryptocurrency is compliant or not compliant with the Funds Travel Rule since the Funds Travel Rule appears to apply to regulated entities, rather than the underlying assets in which the entities trade.”

This could, however, be too late for a solution to convince some of the exchanges who have already decided to play it safe by simply delisting Monero and other Privacy coins that want to avoid potential scrutiny from regulators. As per the reports, the latest Monero Upgrade has finally decided to get rid of GPU and ASIC mining, after the successful implementation of the scheduled event on November 30 as we reported previously.

The new RandomX mining algorithm was introduced to get rid of the ASIC machines and to improve the efficiency of CPUs in general. The specialized mining hardware has been an often-debated issue and some of the critics argue that they have a centralizing effect since only a handful of companies in the world are capable to create the ASICs. On the other hand, some suggest that the ASIC-secured networks are less prone to getting hit with a 51 percent attack.