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Brace Yourself: The EU’s War On Crypto Privacy Is About To Get Absurd

BBG News

The years prowled forward, and shadowless eyes behind mahogany desks in Brussels fixed themselves on the phantoms of Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC), and every sly token hunched in the twilight of privacy. Under the polished boot of the new Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), banks and crypto asset service providers—those modern Dostoevskian bureaucrats—are forbidden, under threat of existential ennui, from offering sanctuary to anonymity or its many children: passbooks, safe-deposit boxes, crypto accounts veiled like Chekhov’s heroines behind petticoats of obfuscation. The EU, with all the gravity of a Dostoyevsky judge reading out a sentence, makes clear via the European Crypto Initiative (EUCI) that no hamlet or technocratic back alley shall be spared 🍷.

Direct Supervision and Materiality Thresholds (Because Even Bureaucracy Has Performance Reviews)

Come July 1, 2027, the starched collars of the Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) will gaze directly—one imagines with the patience of Tolstoy’s winter—upon crypto asset service providers flourishing across at least six EU borders. But only the boisterous will be watched: those who parade more than €50 million (the kind of sum one would bring to buy a small Eastern European city or perhaps two Parisian apartments) or corral more than 20,000 customers into their stables in a single jurisdiction. The quiet providers, meanwhile, will sigh in relief, hoping their files blend in with the dust and the wallpaper.

KYC: Know Your Customer, Appreciate the Absurdity 🤡

Let us raise a glass (of transparent, fully verified mineral water): For every crypto transaction wandering past the €1,000 mark, customer due diligence will be compulsory, as dictated by AMLR, and enforced by service providers now left to wrestle with the gnawing question—how to identify a digital phantom? CASPs regulated by MiCA must, naturally, redesign their innards, perhaps consulting Kafka, ahead of the bureaucratic thunderstorm expected from the European Banking Authority.

This flourish of paperwork, this parade of protocols, is the EU’s grand overture on the digital stage—a deepening shadow over privacy coins and untamed decentralized platforms from Lisbon’s mist to the Baltic’s longing pines. As for the developers and users of anonymity, they must now decide: do they meet the bureaucrats’ gaze, or disappear into a new poem of code?

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2025-05-02 21:13

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