El Salvador president Nayib Bukele reacted to the news that the recently proposed Accountability for Cryptocurrency in El Salvador Act (ACES) had passed the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and will now head to a full Senate vote. The 40-year old national leader responded emotionally on Twitter: Never in my wildest dreams would I have…
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Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), the emirate’s free zone, published a consultation paper on Monday titled “Proposals for enhancements to capital markets and virtual assets in ADGM.” The document contains draft guidelines that, among other asset classes, cover nonfungible token (NFT) trading. The paper proposes that companies with a license from the free zone’s financial…
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Considering the absence of any official announcements, El Salvador’s government seems to have delayed the launch date of the so-called “volcano bonds.” Earlier, Salvadoran Finance Minister Alejandro Zelaya had been reassuring the public that the project would start by March 20. Speaking on a local TV show on Friday, El Salvador’s finance minister once again…
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The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) recommended that the nation’s commercial banks ramp up monitoring users’ transactions that could be aimed at circumventing CBR’s “special economic measures to counter the outflow of foreign currency abroad,” local media reported on Thursday. The recommendation includes closer oversight over crypto trading, which is named among the vehicles for withdrawing…
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Cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced on Wednesday that it had been granted a license to operate in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The company’s presence in the Middle East has been building up lately, with a crypto service provider license in another Gulf market, Bahrain, coming in earlier this week. Under the Dubai virtual asset provider (VASP)…
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On Monday, March 14, the European Blockchain Observatory announced a call for tenders to contract a consortium, the mission of which would be to facilitate and operate a pan-European regulatory sandbox for distributed ledger technologies, or DLT, and blockchain, in particular. A major task for the future consortium will be to provide “comprehensive legal advice”…
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The Financial Monitoring Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan reported earlier today that 55 illegal mining farms “voluntarily stopped their operation” due to an enforcement campaign by the regulator, and another 51 entities’ operations “were terminated.” The enforcement operation targeted illegal mining operations that compromised the nation’s energy network. The Agency called for developing a…
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Earlier today, members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs in the European Parliament voted against a version of the Markets in Crypto Assets, or MiCA, bill that could have effectively banned the proof-of-work-based cryptocurrencies within the EU. This comes as a huge relief for the crypto industry, whose representatives had previously…
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It has been two weeks since Russia kicked off the first large-scale military action in Europe in the 21st century — a so-called “special operation” in Ukraine. The military conflict immediately triggered devastating sanctions against the Russian economy from the United States, the European Union and their allies and has put the crypto industry in…
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On Friday, the Bank of Israel published a draft regulation on Anti-Money-Laundering and Combatting the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) risk management for the banks facilitating crypto-to-fiat transactions. The move hints at the Israeli government’s preparations to legalize and regulate the relationship between banks and virtual currency service providers (VASPs). The document cites the customers’ increased involvement…
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