Last year, Estonia tightened its regulations on preventing money laundering and criminal activities in connection with cryptocurrencies and licensing virtual currency service providers.
This year Estonia has made a clarification on crypto regulations that will not fully ban individuals from anonymously holding crypto. This regulation is recently-drafted and it will soon take place within the county legislation. Rather, these regulations may put a stop to companies from offering anonymous accounts to virtual asset service providers.
However, the Estonian government has made it clear that regulations that are currently pending will not constitute a full ban on holding cryptocurrency anonymously. Nonetheless, the government has clarified that this will only be applied to companies and will not affect individuals who hold cryptocurrency in their personal digital wallets.
On January 2nd the Government came up with an official statement: “the regulation is not applied to customers, but to [virtual asset service providers] who conduct activities for or on behalf of a natural or legal person as a permanent business.” To make sure that virtual asset service providers are active companies, additionally, new regulations will also increase their capital requirements.
The Estonian government stated that these rules bear similarities to banks and payment processing companies’ laws where there is a close watch on financial crime and taking preventive measures.
To make sure that the virtual asset service providers are active companies the new regulations will be set up as such that will increase the capital requirements as well. Through this, latent cryptocurrency service provides will not be able to sell outside of Estonia to third parties.
Prior to becoming a law, the draft legislation is to go through three readings of the parliament of the country.
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