The European Parliament Thursday approved with 529 votes in favour to 29 against and 14 abstentions, the first piece of EU legislation for tracing transfers of crypto-assets like bitcoins and electronic money tokens.
The new rule aims to ensure that crypto transfers, as is the case with any other financial operation, can always be traced and suspicious transactions blocked.
The so-called “travel rule”, already used in traditional finance, will in future cover transfers of crypto assets. Information on the source of the asset and its beneficiary will have to “travel” with the transaction and be stored on both sides of the transfer.
The law would also cover transactions above 1,000 euro (USD 1,009) from so-called self-hosted wallets (a crypto-asset wallet address of a private user) when they interact with hosted wallets managed by crypto-assets service providers.
The European Parliament also gave its final green light with 517 votes in favour to 38 against and 18 abstentions, to new common rules on the supervision, consumer protection and environmental safeguards of crypto-assets, including crypto-currencies.
Moreover, the agreed text includes measures against market manipulation and to prevent money laundering, terrorist financing and other criminal activities.
To counter money-laundering risks the European Securities and Markets Authority will set up a public register for non-compliant crypto assets service providers that operate in the European Union without authorisation, says the text.
The news rules will now have to be formally endorsed by EU member states, before publication in the EU Official Journal. They will enter into force 20 days later.
Source: Kuwait News Agency
