BitBay, a European cryptocurrency exchange, announced this week that it is delisting Monero (XMR,) a privacy-centric crypto asset, because of ongoing concerns that are related to money laundering activities.
The crypto exchange platform announced its decision in recent days and said that the delisting will become official by February 19, 2020. BitBay made sure to explain its decision to its customer base through a statement published on its official website.
Fighting Against Money Laundering
“Monero (XMR) can selectively utilize anonymity features among projects. This feature of XMR is subject to the end of transaction support. The decision was made to block the possibility of money laundering and inflow from external networks,” according to the document published by the exchange itself.
In fact, BitBay will accept XMR deposits until November 29, and because of the upcoming Monero blockchain fork, the withdrawals won’t be processed from that date until December 5, 2019. Overall trading support for the crypto asset will finalize on February 19, 2020. After that date, the exchange will cancel all buy and sell orders.
Also, the exchange officials asked their customers and holders of the privacy-driven asset to take out their XMR by May 20, 2020. After that date, any activity regarding XMR in the BitBay exchange will no longer exist.
Inside the Top 100 of Crypto Exchanges
BitBay has its headquarters in Poland, and according to information provided by Coin360, it is the 90th-largest cryptocurrency exchange by 24-hour trade volume. At the moment of writing this piece, it had a daily trading volume of more than $20.7 million.
The exchange itself observed that, as a regulated platform, it has to make sure to follow certain market standards and rules when it comes to offering protection to its clientele, as well as reporting practices. As a result, it said that it isn’t the only exchange that has elected to delist Monero and other privacy-focused digital assets.
“Monero (and other cryptocurrencies with this specification) has been already delisted on other fiat-crypto exchanges for the same reason. As a licensed exchange, BitBay has to follow the market standards. Compliance with market standards and regulations allows us to provide our clients with legal security and convenience of using the exchange, with the participation of a friendly banking system and the availability of payment operators,” it stated.
Following Other Exchanges’ Steps
For instance, back in September, another prominent exchange, OKEx, proceeded to delist several privacy-oriented tokens. Among those were Monero, Dash (DASH), Zcash (ZEC), Horizen (ZEN) and Super Bitcoin (SBTC). According to the exchange, they fell out of favor with new guidelines set out by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF.)
The reality is that the overall crypto industry landscape isn’t favorable towards coins that concentrate on privacy, such as Monero. A perfect example of that is the concern expressed by the German Federal Ministry of Finance, regarding the increased use of privacy tokens and their possible links with criminal activities.
By Andres Chavez
