Sanctions could be coming to Belarus. Can the crypto-friendly country beat it with Bitcoin or Ethereum? As the massive protests in Belarus continue after a controversial election that saw President Alexander Lukashenko extend his mandate, questions arose about how Belarus could deal with potential U.S. and European Union sanctions and how cryptos such as Bitcoin […]
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Institutional adoption of blockchain can offer great benefits, as truly decentralized control often comes from the roots of centralization. The power of blockchain technology to decentralize control of our financial economy is well documented. It is one of the cornerstones of the origins of the technology, with the genesis block of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin (BTC) […]
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Congressman Soto talks about the point where crypto education meets solid policy and what’s standing in the way. “I remember watching the hearings before the Energy and Commerce Committee with Mark Zuckerberg, and it was clear that a lot of my colleagues didn’t really know a lot about technology,” recalls U.S. Representative Darren Soto. When […]
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Two more South Korean banks are looking at crypto custody options. South Korea’s Woori and Shinhan banks have just announced their intention to introduce “crypto-asset services”. That means that four of the country’s top five banks, holding a combined value of more than $1.2 trillion in assets, are now poised to introduce crypto services. Each […]
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The arrival of digitized securities is one of the core aspects of the federal government’s blockchain strategy, German authorities say. Federal regulators in Germany are looking to modernize the country’s securities with blockchain technology. On Aug. 11, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) and the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection (BMJV) introduced a […]
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Irish crypto firms will face stricter obligations after the country belatedly adopts the latest EU anti-money-laundering rules. Cryptocurrency firms in Ireland will soon be regulated in line with the latest European legal framework for the prevention of money laundering and terrorism financing. On Aug. 10, the Cabinet of Ireland approved a bill to transpose the […]
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The new Russian “crypto” law provides a regulatory regime for tokenized securities and has no regulation for cryptocurrencies. Russian legislators have passed the nation’s first crypto law after discussing crypto regulation for the last five years. The bill, titled “On Digital Financial Assets,” has had dozens of versions that have varied from one another massively. […]
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Compliance with FATF’s travel rule presents major technical difficulties, but the blockchain industry is best-equipped to overcome them. In June 2019, the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) introduced its revised set of standards for virtual asset service providers. The document establishes the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism (AML/CFT) requirements that regulated VASPs — the term […]
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As Trump clamps down on Chinese social media in the U.S., tech in general becomes subject to nationalism. Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor’s note The U.S.–China trade war continues its brazen spillover into tech. In response to concerns over where […]
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Blockchain could be key for ensuring user privacy in COVID-19 contact-tracing apps. Countries all over the world are feeling the impact of COVID-19, as travel restrictions have virtually put an end to tourism for this year. To put this into perspective, recent statistics from Hawaii’s Maui News found that in June of this year, 1,929 […]
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