Bitcoin Forum

I have no clue what forum to post this in, because it's on finance.

We have a couple of clients in the US in the Cannabis sector that have about $20 MM in physical cash and they want to move it to crypto. The problem with moving that much cash into a bank is the FDIC regulated banks have issues with money from cannabis and other community banks that handle cannabis won't take in this much cash at once.

Any clues on banks or institutions that can help with this transaction?

thanks (except for the smart ass comments that will follow of course. ha)

Interesting problem. I thought there was legislation in motion to alleviate the Cannabis income banking (https://www.marijuanamoment.net/u-s-house-debates-marijuana-banking-bill-with-final-vote-set-for-this-evening/) quandary in the US. I take it there has been no motion on the SAFE Banking Act?

I would network with known crypto investors that are also in the cannabis niche. You may find a private investor willing to trade.

Is that money legal?

Theoretically, they could just make a cash deposit to their bank account, and then make a wire to Coinbase.

If it is legal, after the bank verify the documentation, I doubt they would have problems.

You cannot make a cash deposit to any reliable exchange. The volume is too high to buy p2p or any other method. You must trade it in an exchange, due to the high volume.

How about handling the exchange in multiple transactions over a period of time?
They deposit the limit and trade that on an exchange or OTC, repeating the process until you've converted majority of that to Bitcoin.
They will also  withdraw overtime to a wallet (preferably hardware, with multiple signatures and backups).

Transaction fees would cost a lot, but it seems a safe bet besides finding a bank to accept the whole deposit at once.

If you're interested in a way to move money to BTC without even touching banks, then peer-to-peer is your only solution. Head over to LocalCryptos[1] or HodlHodl[2], select your country, and look for BTC sellers that are willing to take in cash. Yea you might end up needing to drive to neighboring cities, but this is one of the solutions.

https://i.imgur.com/kGZTt5X.png https://i.imgur.com/ALzSL8t.png

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[1] https://localcryptos.com/
[2] https://hodlhodl.com/

If you are trying to move the funds all at once then you are going to face issue for sure, just use the US regulated exchange since US doesn't allow the global exchanges to operates there.

Other way is to trade via peer to peer trading platforms where you are going to interact with some random users but you need to trade with hundreds of people to convert huge amount of physical cash into BTC.

People engaged in legal cannabis business in the US are still prohibited from accessing banking services. They are only allowed to use cold cash for their transactions and that's the reason why they can only deposit limited amounts in "unregulated" community banks. The Safe Banking Act mentioned by NotFuzzyWarm would allow them to open bank accounts. US House already approved it but it looks like it hasn't been approved in the Senate yet.

Localbitcoins could be a good option because in that platform you buy the BTC from the users and not from the exchange. And to have lower risk with the trade i would recommend avoiding go all-in, and change that money by batches of $1M. Once you find the right trader then go with bigger amounts.

You should be really careful with this transaction because the government can tag them as money laundering, so, play it smart.

Bitpay (https://bitpay.com).

Keep in mind that the LocalBitcoins was strictly enforced KYC/AML implementation and I don't think this is a good choice for them, for sure they will be suspected of money laundering in the first place when they want to cash out at once or the worse is when their account putting on hold and asking documents where the money comes from.  If there's no source of funds, it will always be suspected as money laundering, which is very risky.

The only way to have a solution, follow as suggested above, use P2P exchange like Hodl-Hodl and purchase Bitcoin little by little so that no one will be suspected for every transaction they had.  In the Holdhold FAQ (https://hodlhodl.com/pages/faq), the maximum offer in a max level account is 40 bitcoin, I think that is enough for a single transaction.