Bancor Exchange Plans To Restrict US Residents From Trading

The decentralized Bancor exchange and trading platform is currently planning to restrict the United States residents from trading tokens on July 8, as the company confirmed in a blog post on June 18.

The exchange cited a lack of clarity from the regulators side. According to its executives which went viral in our altcoin news section, the decision to ban all of the users with a US IP address from exchanging cryptocurrency was a shared one.

“This decision has been made in light of increased regulatory uncertainty; at this time, we believe this is the most judicious decision for all the members of our ecosystem,” the blog post shared on Bancor exchange reads.

It also continues stating that the decision will “enable the Bancor community and ecosystem to innovate faster and with greater clarity.” Currently, Bancor runs as a decentralized protocol using a P2P setup. As many best cryptocurrency news sites noted, it is unclear what was the factor that motivated the move.

The regulatory situation now involves another decentralized exchange (DEX) named Etherdelta, which did the same thing in 2018 – illustrating the difficulties of operating such a service in the US. Last year, the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged the founder of Etherdelta, Zachary Coburn, with operating an unregistered securities trading platform and a $300,000 fine.

Right now, the Bancor exchange is in the latest cryptocurrency news on many websites. As it adds in the blog post, all of its users will still be able to hold and transfer tokens, while conceding that the decentralized portions of its network were beyond its control and would thus remain open to the US traders.

“We would like to clarify that this functionality will be blocked to users accessing the website bancor.network, which offers an interface to blockchain activity. As the Bancor Liquidity Network is a collection of smart contracts on the blockchain, and a non-custodial system, we cannot restrict users from accessing the blockchain itself. This cannot be blocked,” the blog post concludes.

If you are new to the latest regulation frenzy in the US, you should know that new international recommendations from the Financial Action Task Force were brought up – placing stringent new ID requirements on any entity and user facilitating crypto trading – both for US residents living in and ones living out of the country.