EU Lawmakers Will Vote On Blocking Anonymous Crypto Payments

The EU lawmakers will vote on blocking anonymous crypto payments and they also want to curb payments to tax havens and check people’s identity in payments between unhosted wallets so let’s read more in today’s latest cryptocurrency news.

The members of the EU Parliament are likely to vote to end the anonymity of crypto payments and a committee meeting will be held next week as the new documents show. The lawmakers at the Economic Affairs Committee are poised to include transfers to self-hosted or private wallets in all the AML checks and want to halt crypto transfers between the EU and the jurisdictions such as Hong Kong and Turkey.

Under the existing laws, the payees have to be identified for the bank transfers of over $1099 and the bloc’s national governemnt already noted that they want to scrap the lower limit when extending the rules to crypto assets on the basis that the larger transactions can be broken up into smaller ones which is a practice known as “smurfing.” The national laundering officials cited crypto’s use in funding terrorism and child abuse, seem to agree, and require identity checks for any size of crypto payment. Almost everyone from the regulators seems to acknowledge they won’t win the vote.

The EU lawmakers will vote on blocking the anonymous transactions and the lawmakers will also tell the crypto providers to refrain from making transfers deemed at high risk of money laundering or crime. In practice, this will make it harder or impossible to make transfers from the EU to anywhere deemed as a tax haven like the UK Virgin Islands, the US, Russia, Turkey, and Hong Kong. Assita Kanko as one of the main lawmakers responsible for marshaling the views of the parliament on the law said that she also wants to extend the measures and include privately held crypto assets in spite of the uncertainty over how the transactions between unhosted wallets can be enforced.

The EU finance chief said that early next year a bill for the digital euro will be proposed. In the announcement published today, the EU Finance chief Mairead McGuinness said that the European Union considers creating digital euro legislation by 2023. The digital euro will be the EU’s version of a central bank digital currency and CBDCs are a digital version of a fiat currency backed by a central bank while in this case that would be the issuance of the digital euro.