Tezos announced this week that it will implement new Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) measures to which its contributors must adjust, since personal identification will be required for the cryptoactive claim in the Tezos project.
Made public through a press release, the Tezos Foundation affirmed that now all the contributors to the project must submit to a new identification regime that seeks to comply with the legal framework required by the regulatory authorities.
Among the details of this new measure is that the organization hired an external provider to provide its services so that all the KYC and AML procedures necessary to ensure the initiative are carried out correctly.
In this sense, the users who participated in the donation of Tezos must register their personal data to receive the activation code of their public key. After proper identification, taxpayers can finally access the much-awaited Tezos.
The Tezos Foundation calls this implementation of the KYC and AML measures a legal "good practice". And although they disagree with the collection of personal information on the Internet, as well as respect the privacy of their users' information, according to the statement, they believe that enabling these measures can significantly improve the blockchain ecosystem.
The Tezos Foundation intends to use its resources to support activities that promote the protocol of Tezos, its community and open source technologies; The implementation of KYC / AML controls of all collaborators will allow the Foundation to support these objectives.
This new measure just out of the oven of the Tezos board represents another of the many unforeseen events that the taxpayers of the initiative have experienced in order to take over their cryptoactives. What started last year as one of the most promising blockchain projects in the market, has become today a reference for a problematic Initial Currency Offer (ICO).
Tezos is an initiative that aims to "formalize the governance of the blockchain". In this sense, the project can be a solution that helps to make the best decisions together when making a bifurcation, ensuring the governance and continuity of the network through protocol improvements, intelligent contracts and decentralized applications.
However, legal discussions, administrative tensions and abrupt resignations have characterized these last months of development of Tezos, since one of its administrators, Johann Gevers, was accused of trying to divert funds from the project seeking personal benefits.
This situation generated a whole battle between the co-founders Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, intellectual owners of Tezos, and the foundation that controls the funds (the Tezos Foundation), integrated by Gevers and Guido Schmitz-Krummacher. In this scenario, taxpayers were left in the middle of legal discussions, with their donations frozen and the project without a clear future.
As expected, this sparked a wave of dissatisfaction in Tezos's community of taxpayers, who initiated repeated lawsuits against the administrative group. For example, in November 2017 they were collectively sued before the California court, demanding reimbursement of the money invested in the project. Weeks later, an Illinois company proceeded legally against the Tezos platform and then another class action lawsuit was filed that qualified the ICO as "illegal."
However, although Gevers and Schmitz-Krummache decided to relinquish their posts, relatively calming the tensions, taxpayer cryptoactives have not yet been delivered. This is still waiting for the launch of the Betanet test network, which will be incorporated into these new regulatory measures just announced
To all the alcabalas that have had to exceed the taxpayers of Tezos, now add these new rules of AML and KYC. Some users have expressed their outrage as they wanted to invest anonymously and consider this new regulation a violation of their privacy. Many others are tired of waiting and avoiding obstacles to get their Tezos.