European Parliament intends to expand the concept of cryptocurrencies

The EU Parliament has made a recommendation to expand the concept of digital assets and a list of regulated enterprises operating in the eurozone related to this type of activity. Thus, officials recognized that the Fifth EU Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD5), adopted in 2018, can no longer meet the strict measures established by the FATF, therefore, the developers intend to bring the European version of the regulation in line with the international one.

In particular, changes will be introduced regarding trading platforms that work directly with cryptocurrency. Even though such companies do not work with fiat money, they must comply with anti-money laundering measures. The report raised the issue of inherent risks. In particular, the authors of the document also mentioned that digital assets have increased volatility, and many EU financial institutions work with such assets. “If such enterprises nevertheless decide to include them in their reports, they can incur significant losses,” the researchers say and believe that the exclusion of cryptocurrencies from the number of own assets of credit institutions can solve the problem, and it is proposed to attribute unregulated assets to high-risk ones.