The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network [FinCen] issued its guidance on the ‘Application of FinCEN’s Regulations to Certain Business Models Involving Convertible Virtual Currencies’ on May 9, 2019. The guidance elucidates how money transmission regulations apply to a business involved in providing convertible virtual currency services. This includes P2P exchanges, wallets, hosted and un-hosted wallets providers, multi-sig wallet providers, kiosks, providers of anonymity-enhanced convertible virtual currencies, and more.

This created a lot of buzz in the crypto-verse, with several influencers speaking about the impact this would have. Emin Gun Sirer was one of them and stated that this was “mostly bad news”. Others included the Chief Legal Officer of Blockchain, Marco Santori, who went on to explain that this would have “major implications for wallets, exchanges, ICO issuers, dApps, DEXs”.

Marco Santori tweeted,

4/ FinCEN is a big data agency. They scoop as much transaction data, identifying information, suspicious activity reporting as possible, and use it to stop the bad guys. They’ve been doing it for crypto, too – since at least 2013!

— Marco Santori (@msantoriESQ) May 9, 2019

This was followed by Satori explaining its impact on ICOs and developer applications, stating that according to FinCen, ICO sellers could fall under money transmitter regulations in a few situations. Importantly “only if they actually transmit money”. He said,

“FinCEN mostly speaks in jargon here so I’ll boil it down: software development? not regulated. *deploying* software? still not regulated deploying software that transmits money? Very much regulated Not super helpful but as good as their guidance gets.”

To this, Riccardo Spagni, the lead developer of Monero [XMR], said,

“FinCEN comes out swinging, and confirms that Bitcoin, Monero, and others are safe in developing and deploying cryptocurrency software.”

The post Bitcoin Lightning node and FinCen: ‘It’s just silly. Honestly, people, stop with this stuff,’ says Legal Officer appeared first on AMBCrypto.

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