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Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF), a global organiztion working to prevent Money Laundering is enforcing a law for any exchange or services to ask for full identity verification for anyone who transacts over $1000 at once. Rules made by FATF are obligatory.

Here's a TNW's article explaining it
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/06/12/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-fatf-regulation/

There will probably be more orders for $999.99.

Hawala and money laundering in large scale takes place through the offline means. As everything through the online mode is being recorded it is truly a hard thing to escape limitations. Even if it is done and at some point if there is back tracking it'll be easily caught. To avoid such restrictions and to be on the safer side face to face transaction crossing several hands were done. If $1000 gets into restriction then no business is possible anymore.

People will find a way around it. They always do.

$1000 Is too low I think. But even though they mandate something like that, people will always find ways. Cryptocurrency is decentralized so, people can use crypto to get away with $1000 without following what is mandated.

I also think is too low, but maybe this what something they plan to do from long time ago, but people who make money laundering will find a way to avoid laws and this law is just something to see they fight against money laundering.

The most important thing to do right now is to get all your coins off of exchanges and in to your own wallets until this is sorted out.

We have seen time and time again in the past various exchanges springing aggressive and unannounced KYC requirements on their users, and refusing to allow users to withdraw their coins unless they comply, essentially holding their coins hostage. It is almost a certainty that various exchanges will introduce new or upgraded KYC requirements because of this ruling, and there will be probably thousands of users who find themselves unable to withdraw their coins. There's also a possibility that some of the less above board exchanges just shut down altogether so as to not expose their own shortcomings, and take and coins they are holding with them. Bear in mind that this is for anyone "sending or receiving" and not "trading", so web wallets will likely also be affected.

If you are not actively trading, and are not using a big exchange which is likely to already be compliant with these rules, then withdraw your coins to a wallet on your own computer, not a web wallet.

Not necessarily. It can be as well $1000 during some specific period/wallet.

Sooner or later we know that this is going to be implemented given that the talks for money laundering is so prominent yet again. Also, the threshold is still a doable amount for small-time traders, but for serious, big-time traders wanting to make a lot of money, of course they need to comply with AML and KYC regulations. Perhaps as more and more regulations (KYC related ones) are being imposed by the governments, more and more interest would be built up for creating proper platforms for a working DEX.

Anyway, such verification requirement will be a huge hit to anonymous cryptos.

Is anyone really surprised by this? I've always thought that such regulations was inevitable. It was pretty much just a matter of 'when', and here it is. Also, I definitely don't think this is the last of it. There will be more rules to follow as time goes.

If they will implement it, people will still do everything to avoid and get rid of passing the verification requirement that they want. It's fine that they have a limit amount but I don't think everyone is willing to comply with it. Money laundering is everywhere and they couldn't stop it by asking everyone to pass a certain KYC.

The ultimate goal is to make cryptocurrency system similar to banking. Next step would be an obligatory registration of a wallet.

Don't forget that the true power ultimately is with the people.  If enough people refuse to pay taxes and not service the government they have no other option than to obey our wishes.  Shouldn't be complacent but bread and circuses will do that to people.

Not me, a lot of cryptocurrency exchanges(Binance, Hitbtc, kucoin are some examples) have implemented the same rules but with a slightly higher minimum.

Others could get away with it temporarily but later on they'll be forced to follow if their exchange gets big.

After a few seconds, the value of those orders suddenly becomes $1000 because of the volatility.  :P

$950 it is.

Well, I don't think that making transactions less than $1k is going to be a big problem. I mean, if you have a couple of thousands of dollars, you can just split them into 2-3 transactions. If you have $10+k, then I guess the risk of money laundering is real, the suspicion is justified, and KYC makes sense. That being said, I would not pass KYC on shady websites, because the risks of identity stealth might be real. I don't usually buy or sell more than a couple of hundreds of dollars worth of cryptos, so for me, this rule is not a problem. But maybe the barrier is too low indeed and should be increased to around $10k. But hey, it's better than it could be, right? FATF could've made KYC obligatory for every transaction, and that would've been way worse.

This will not hold sand not even by the said body on crypto regulatory system. But if you talked about the wen wallet that can be possible but not with other wallet mate. Right now am moving out my coins from the exchange i operate before the regulation hold ground. Blockchain all the way..... safe and be the safest.   

Bitcoin will survive as digital asset only. Bitcoin will have to be traded like Silver. All the documents needed. Banks will stop all anonymous transactions.

lol ;D, that's true because price changes can happen anytime or at any time. Jasi I think it must be done, but even so they will surely find a way out.

Absolutely impossible to enforce. At the end of the day, all a wallet really is is a string of characters known as your seed. Your private keys, public keys, and mnemonic phrase, are all derived from this seed. You can't force people to register random strings of characters. You might as well be trying to force registration of physical cash.

Good luck getting enough people to refuse to pay taxes to make the government obey your wishes. Anything less than a few tens of millions, and you'll just find yourself arrested instead. Also good luck even finding a few tens of millions who all agree with government should do the same thing that you are presumably demanding.

This is exactly what is going to happen :D but they might be having some bench mark to identify many sub $1000 transactions to a particular account and if they set a trigger to monitor strange transactions, your account will be monitored and that is how things work in the real world. Lets see how they are going to implement these things, there is always a loop hole for every process  ;D.

I'm even surprised that people doesn't get used to this kind of news on where regulations or sudden change up of rules is being mandated.
For now on having that $1000 threshold which is really too low but just like on what most people do said on here that people would always find ways to bypass such verification no doubt.

It is a way to inhibit some bad practices, but not all will be inhibited. The documents may be from someone real but they are just giving someone else's documents. And as already said, more looting below the limit of identification will be made

At the current time this is somewhat easy for me to get around, if I wanted to.  Fortunately my coins are old long term holdings, which have been multi tumbled in years past.  My bigger concern is that to "cash out" legally the taxes are crazy.  Its tough to consider trading coins for cash to beat KYC and to avoid legal taxes.  That is not how I was raised (good parents I guess).  Many of us here face the same thing, so what is your answer?

Trading between cryptocurrencies will become more popular and stablecoins will go boom. Also exchanges will have an option to move to countries that aren't members of this FATF. I checked and Malta isn't one and many crypto businesses are located there.

The 999 dollar orders are also a funny thing. Even if they all agree to implement it it's going to be a lot of data to analyse. Who is going to go through all those exchange reports. Banks don't report you when you withdraw 1000 dollars so why the sudden craze about crypto?

obligatory for who? I don't think that applies to all the countries in the world. I never heard about FATF before, so they should only apply for USA or for some European countries...

I will search for more information about it.

Obligatory for everyone, apparently. Here's an article from Bloomberg that gives a bit more relevant information:


This article does make things a bit clearer than the click baity one that OP posted. Turns out in 9 days FATF are going to publish a recommendation. Certainly not that everything is going to grind to a halt in 9 days like the first article suggests. We will likely have plenty of time to see how exchanges and other services are planning to implement these new recommendations.

Still, the whole point of crypto is to not have some centralized authority watching over all your transactions, right? All the more reason to trade P2P.

There will probably be provisions to identify people who are structuring transactions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring) to avoid reporting. For example, the Bank Secrecy Act obligates banks to file Suspicious Activity Reports where they suspect deposit structuring to avoid the $10,000 Currency Transaction Report threshold. We'll probably see something similar when the final FATF guidelines are released.

What a load of crap. I have even heard of this "firm" I don't live in USA how does this affect me? How about !@#$ right off? USA always puts their dirty fingers where they don't belong.
I just won't use exchanges and trade privately or just go to decentralized exchanges. They can't do anything crypto isn't even money and is under noones control. I am pretty sure this only applies to fiat anyway.

As I always said that the "time" is the only thing until cryptoverse will be fully centralized.

Is there any option left for us to choose either to do KYC or not to do? NO!

How long can we hide ourselves in a decentralized wallet? At the end we need to cash to fiat, right?
Almost all exchanges need KYC now, p2p exchanges also need KYC.

Face to Face trades in local is also risky,
 - someone can take everything from your wallet by pointing a gun at you.
 - maybe the police are waiting for you (if you are from a banned country)
 - Of course the volume is low

I can't find a solution, do you?

A proper decentralized or good P2P exchange would be nice. What would be even nicer is to spend your bitcoin directly. I very rarely sell bitcoin for fiat - I much prefer to support bitcoin's growth and fuel its adoption by spending it directly, taking my business to places I can spend it directly, and asking every company I like which doesn't accept it yet to consider accepting it.

These guidelines will affect businesses -- exchanges, custodians, hedge funds and such. They won't affect peer-to-peer traders who aren't engaged in a business. If centralized exchanges and P2P marketplaces become an inconvenient privacy nightmare, that might provide real impetus for adoption of things like Bisq and Hodl Hodl.

I sure hope so, anyway. :)

Verifying identity might not be a difficult task for citizens of many countries but there are also some countries where you end up in jail just for using cryptocurrency.
The data receied by FAFT could be asked by the member country and they would gladly provide the identitty of everyone that transacted over $1000 ending people into jail.
Sending $999 would be a workaround for some time but the solution would be to go decentralized.

sooner or later all the exchanges that are working with fiat will implement strict KYC rules if they haven't already and people using these exchanges should know and accept it because they have no other choice and i don't think we can ever make this decentralized since it always is linked with fiat which is centralized and requires banks.

but any other exchange (meaning altcoin exchanges) that don't have fiat should never implement this and if they do, they will sign their own death because it pushes people towards decentralized exchanges and as DEXes improve more they will eventually replace these centralized exchanges.

nothing will happen on day 1 when the FATF recommendations drop. regulators need time to finalize their own national regs. and hopefully this is truly the case:


i've got a bad feeling about all this though. they seem intent on crushing the trading freedoms we currently enjoy.

the elephant in the room = binance, bitmex. huge exchanges that thrive off no KYC. they could be run out of town by their regulators (malta, seychelles) for noncompliance. then what, turn to FATF blacklist countries? that works fine for customers since it's 100% crypto but covering overheads, payrolls, etc is another story.

There are no need to go to extremes like that, just spread your transactions over several exchanges and do multiple small transactions if you need to shift a lot of money.  ::)

I have money in several different exchanges for trading purposes <not large amounts> because you need to act quickly with buy & sell orders. People tend to over react on news like this, but most regulated exchanges are fully KYC/AML compliant in any way.  ::)

Sit back, relax and just use decentralized exchanges and OTC platforms and Person2Person trades.  ::)

I think the popular blockchain wallet had seen this coming before now and they had to give out $25 worth of stellar to their customers to complete KYC in other not to lose customers. Someone had pointed out that a higher power was pushing blockchain to do so. I don't understand how this will go but technology I believe will find its way around this proposed regulation.

$1000 is not too big depends on how much people will withdraw their money because when the market is increasing, people can withdraw more than $1000. Maybe they need to increase the amount for $10k, so they can get the name from each exchange and they can ask the person on where he transfers the money. Money laundering is the big problem that is happening in many countries, and that will be a hard thing to do to prevent money laundering is happen.

I think that this tendency will only strengthen, and in the next 1-3 years this procedure of verification of identity will appear on all major exchanges. Government regulators will put pressure on exchanges so that exchanges disclose customer data and actively work with regulatory authorities. And they can be understood, because in fact it can be stolen money or money from the sale of drugs. Imagine that someone has robbed you and then transferred the money to Bitcoins without any problems and the rest of life rests with impunity somewhere on the islands. Is it normal?

The Blockchain.com wallet's KYC isn't mandatory though? You only need to complete the KYC/AML requirements if you want the "free" XLM airdrop.  I'm pretty sure you're free to use the Blockchain.com wallet without submitting KYC requirements.

Not sure how can this be applied to crypto - since people just wont exchange money to fiat on online exchanges and just use wallets that dont require KYC and DEX and then just take their cash offline via localbitcoins

LocalBitcoins removed face to face exchange option, as well as they introduced KYC. Although some of the users disagree with our statement above, for the regulators a wallet will be regarded in the same way as a bank account - you need to verify yourself to open a bank account (you can open one only with ID).

I think the FATF policy for a nominal value of $ 1000 is still relatively low, should at least $ 10000 be used as a reference for money laundering cases so I think the $ 1000 money must still be assessed for money to do identity verification

Money laundering was also done when there was no online transaction, people find many ways to it. Carrying and delivering hard cash is very common method of money laundering. Blockchain technology may be like "ice on the cake" for people doing money laundering as funds can be transferred across the border without any limitations and there is no any transaction record for it. It may be a good step of verifying identity to stop such transactions but it is very difficult to stop money laundering. Some smart and concrete ways are the demand of the hour to stop it.

sooner or later this will happen, because it is necessary but only for honest people, and money laundering criminals will find a way to circumvent the law easily.

Damn, i just realized my country is on the list of countries affected for this, at it sucks hard. How can they claim $1k is money laundering? like if $1k were a big amount of money, you can't even buy a car with that, so that amount is ridiculous. But they are who decide the rules of the game, so, get ready to see things getting fucked up.

This is it, where i can find a list of countries who are affected by this? And if i have 1000$ ~ Ethereum or Bitcoin on hardware wallet should i do kyc only to exchange i send or also for hardware wallet?

the number definitely seems low to me but I doubt anyone will be watching closely unless shifts of this transaction happen frequently.

In the case of most exchanges without KYC/AML like Binance, you can take advantage of this by simply creating multiple accounts. While you can say that $1000 is a small amount to launder money, you can do it multiple times with multiple accounts, increasing the numbers significantly.

I know right, lol. People can always find ways to get away with it, but on the other hand it could be good to avoid fraud and to ensure that the person receiving the $1000 is legit and the true owner. Though this can be very annoying because normally identity verification can be very complicated at times.

Whether it be by delay of acceptance, or by identification, security, and so on. Only those who want to withdraw values greater than 1k dollars, or at least one account that has frequent withdrawals, will be taxed. These yes, deserve to be identified for being suspicious, No user earned their coins by publicizing projects.

The rules state that KYC checks should be carried out for those who not only send a cryptocurrency amount in excess of $ 1,000, but also who receive that amount. This means that if we, at ICO signature companies, receive a reward of over a thousand dollars, we will be forced to undergo a KYC check. At the same time, ace, who receive less than a thousand dollars, will be exempt from the need to undergo such testing. The bad news is that the KYC check will be legitimized for ICO bounty campaign participants after the end of the ICO, when the steaks and the amount of tokens paid are calculated. However, it seems to me that now we are rarely paid amounts in excess of a thousand dollars.

the entire world is affected, basically. there may be a period of time (a couple years maybe) where non-compliant exchanges can keep hiding out in the seychelles, hong kong, BVI, and such places. but eventually these jurisdictions will force them out when they are faced with the FATF blacklist.

the only countries that continue to tolerate remaining on the blacklist are places like iran and north korea.

the $1k threshold is pretty upsetting. even in the USA the AML reporting threshold for financial institutions is $10k. that would never be an issue for me. but $1k? such a low threshold will affect most little crypto investors across the world!

Exactly. What prevents someone who sends $2,500 to somewhere to split that amount to 5 equal parts? One disadvantage may be the slight increase in the transaction fee, but I am OK with paying $15 instead of $3 as long as the coins reach the intended recipient. Why the authorities are so obsessed with the small fish, when most of the money laundering is being done by the banks such as HSBC? An example here:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-probe/hsbc-to-pay-1-9-billion-u-s-fine-in-money-laundering-case-idUSBRE8BA05M20121211

i haven't read the draft yet but lawmakers usually account for this. for instance, under american law, what you're describing is a crime called "structuring" or "smurfing". here's what the IRS has to say about it: https://www.irs.gov/irm/part4/irm_04-026-013

basically, if you conduct transactions (in any amount) for the purpose of evading CTR reporting ($10k threshold) then you are guilty of structuring.

i would be very, very surprised if the FATF magically forgets to establish similar recommendations.

$1000 is way too low better make it $100000, well if they actually succeed on that $1000 identity verification people will find a way how they can cash in or cash out greater than or lower than $1000. People are smart enough to handle those kinds of things.

I think it's true, someone who does money laundering can be called a scammer and scammers have many ways to manipulate. Cammer can create multiple accounts with fake data and then send their crime money to another wallet, obviously this is still not very effective in dealing with money laundering . If I think KYC must do it, they must do everything.

And i think the regulation that will be issued by the FATF does not actually eliminate money laundering, it only minimizes the laundering of large amounts of money.

Exchange like Bitmart already made it compulsory to do kyc before withdraw any amount from the exchange unlike other exchange that allow unverified accounts to withdraw around 2btc,
only that if you are making a deposit to Bitmart wether verified or not they don't have a problem with it but to withdraw you will be ask to do kyc first even though the amount is less,
At least now everyone will be aware of what is required to transact, now people can only limit theirself to some exchange, you can't afford to do kyc in all exchange you have account with :-\

yah just split it like i do everything in real life, under $4 so I save 45cents on every 6$. If they make the limit 1k, just make many accounts :P

At the moment, sure, but when these new laws come in to place doing so will be a crime, and Binance will be fined if they allow it to happen. Even if they don't go down the route of full KYC, which I suspect they will, they will definitely start clamping down on multiple accounts doing this using the same deposit or withdrawal addresses or coming from the same IP address.

$1000 limit would destroy the trading business of crypto. That's the reason we move to decentralized exchanges, the real decentralized ones that does not asks for KYC. Unless we need to deposit from or withdraw as fiat, we would not require to follow the law of FATF if we use decentralized exchange. Withdrawing and depositing would be fine with $999 a day.

I bet this regulation is just a start. But still, we have coins such as monero. I am really interested in how everything will work in the future. On the first side is regulation, on the second crypto technology what makes possible to work without regulation.

Sometimes it must be in this way to make people truly obey the rules and code of ethics in crypto. It might be possible for them to trick a fake identity or borrow someone else's identity. (This is the most confusing thing). But as long as one of the parties feels that it benefits from this it is not a problem.

Does this mean that they’re trying to take away the power of the people? And to possibly end decentralization? If that would happen, it may not be sooner or in a few years. It’s because they’ve seen that we are starting to store our funds into crypto more than in banks.

I think it would take several years before this goes in full effect, because we are talking not just one country, but a lot of countries worldwide. Correct me if I’m wrong though.

This is just my own point of view regarding this news. I would rather support regulation of running ICOs or token sales than regulating crypto trading and withdrawing.

But still, withdrawing $999.99 a day would be no problem for me whatsoever (unless if its a big emergency or so).

P.S. I would believe they have the power to do this if they’re in full control of the whole blockchain tech in the world. But in reality, they can’t control or stop blockchain transactions.

We can see that more and more rules that are aplicable in traditional financial world are also implemented in crypto world. KYC is one of them.
It's interesting though how many users complain about increasing number of frauds and misuse of cryptocurrencies but on the other hand they extremly hard accept mechanisms that could help in dealing with such issues.

Yep exactly. While I don't think Binance is quite strict with this right now, I think they will be quite soon. I think they will start locking up accounts with incomplete account information or something(assuming they aren't locking up accounts right now).

Unfortunately, we really don't have a 100% decentralized exchange right now. Moving to those partly "decentralized" exchanges won't save us forever. Remember when IDEX introduced KYC? It's because while they call these exchanges "decentralized", companies still run them. And these companies can always be pursued by the government.

And this will never happen anymore imo. If a new one borns then the authorities will force them to implement KYC, otherwise they will crack it down for sure.


It's like a dream for me as of now, maybe after a decade or two later it will happen. Currently I don't have any option to spend directly locally except online usage.


Truly speaking, I have never sold any of my hodling since I started my journey in cryptoverse.
All my hodlings, trading capitals are kept intact - you can say I have never tasted honey which I got from investment or earned by trading.

We are in the same boat, we are both trying to support crypto, but any time in the future we may need a way to cash our hodlings.
I say cash because crypto spending still has to go a long way. Maybe within the next 5-8 years, I will retire and I don't think crypto will get much adoption within this time (at least for my place).

What I have converted to fiat so far is from my sig earnings and other tiny incomes.

To begin with maybe, but as mjglqw says, laws, regulations, and KYC will likely reach them too before long. I'm not big in to altcoins, but any time I have wanted to buy or trade altcoins I've just done it peer to peer. Even with peer to peer platforms like localbitcoins also introducing KYC, there is no shortage of methods to find people to trade with.

It you are regularly depositing or withdrawing >$900 a day, your account will be flagged up for potentially evading the rules. Behavior like this will quickly be clamped down on.

It seems that crypto through the regulation of the procedure for its use will almost completely lose its anonymity. Indeed, this is only the beginning and this was to be expected. After that, other restrictions will follow, which citizens will try to circumvent. However, I would not say that it is definitely bad. It is necessary to regulate this process and it is inevitable.

i do not believe that this fatf has jurisdiction in my country where the limit for the use of cash is 3000 euros, but even if this new restriction arrives in the future, it is enough to make transactions of 1 cent below the limit

Only the smaller players are going to get affected. The bigger ones usually hire someone to do the KYC for them (obviously using the stolen documents which are available in the dark markets). And expect these guys to get more active, as there has been a big spike in the exchange rates for all the cryptocurrencies, during the past 2-3 months.

It's probably the other way around.. as the small players wouldn't even probably reach the $1000 threshold.

That's quite an assumption. I'm pretty sure a big player wouldn't risk using stolen KYC documents. They catch you? Say goodbye to your funds.

I believe this will be a problem, because lots of law-abiding people and businesses don't want to be inconvenienced with breaking their transactions into parts - it would add to costs, for one thing. The article even mentions that compliance with these new rules will be a costly headache for businesses. It seems the industry and regulators will be butting heads soon, and this will either be resolved through the courts or with maverick legislators creating a more favorable regulatory environment for the industry, or both. At least governments are finally acknowledging that cryptocurrencies are here to stay and must be addressed.

True, most whales would rarely do such thing knowing exchanges have this in their terms and conditions, they could easily punish anyone if they get caught. It's better to go with the safer option and submit your documents than to rely on the documents of someone else if you're making transactions above the threshold.

These rules are useless. People will always find a way around them. I agree with the commentator above that $ 1000 is too small an amount for such a limitation. It would be better if they paid attention to a larger turnover of money.