FATF! A new sheriff in town?

^{Image by Peter Hauschild from Pixabay}

It was too good to be true and lately, I have observed the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH, LTC, etc), the use of them to acquire products and services, even ATMs that can exchange cryptocurrencies to money or fiat. As we already know, these transactions don't need government supervision in order to be executed, since they are often made peer-to-peer. Well, governments have decided to participate in the world of the crypto sphere. Like it or not.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) or GAFI (Grupo de Acción Financiera in Spanish) comes with a series of recommendations for businesses that provide cryptocurrency exchanges (BTW, on June 21). If they thought SEC was annoying, FATF will make it look like a child.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is an inter-governmental body established in 1989 by the Ministers of its Member jurisdictions. The objectives of the FATF are to set standards and promote effective implementation of legal, regulatory and operational measures for combating money laundering, terrorist financing and other related threats to the integrity of the international financial system. The FATF is therefore a “policy-making body” which works to generate the necessary political will to bring about national legislative and regulatory reforms in these areas.

Source:http://www.fatf-gafi.org

Starting by having 200 countries treat cryptocurrencies like banks. Possibly, maybe, perhaps (?), they don't understand the concept of blockchain technology. But they expect the identity of the sender and receiver to be automatically validated during a blockchain transaction. How about that?

In addition to requesting, among others, personal information for those who wish to exchange more than $1000 in cryptocurrencies. In the same way, requiring these agencies to comply with a series of regulations to monitor and oversee the transactions of their users.

This will entail high costs for crypto assets exchange companies to implement new technologies to comply with FAFT regulations.

The other problem is that if a country does not comply with these recommendations, it will be placed on the FATF blacklist. No pressure, guys, but remember: