The world’s biggest economies are now eyeing a definitive plan to apply anti-money laundering (AML) regulatory standards for the cryptocurrency sector by October this year.
The Group of Twenty (G20) forum – a group of finance ministers and central bank governors from the EU and 19 of the world’s largest economies – has reiterated its intent to bring the cryptocurrency sector under the purview of international AML standards during a meeting in Buenos Aires over the weekend.
An official statement issued by the forum on Sunday confirmed member nations will ‘remain vigilant’ in monitoring the crypto sector despite claiming ‘crypto-assets do not at this point pose a global financial stability risk’.
The G20 forum pointedly called on its watchdog, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and other related regulators in standard setting bodies (SSBs) to monitor risks in the sector as well to ‘assess multilateral responses as needed.’
Further, an excerpt from the document revealed G20 members doubling down on their intention to regulate the cryptocurrency sector in their jurisdictions while setting an October deadline for proposals to that end.
The statement read:
“We reiterate our March commitments related to the implementation of the FATF standards and we ask the FATF to clarify in October 2019 how its standards apply to crypto-assets.”
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) – an international body of 37 nations tasked to combat money laundering and terrorism financing – is already working on binding rules for cryptocurrency exchanges globally. Discussions toward the initiative began in June toward a unified approach in establishing licenses and KYC norms for cryptocurrency exchanges.
A reported last week, the FSB outlined a number of metrics to monitor crypto markets as a part of its new framework. Keeping track of the market cap of major coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum, both in size and growth, and their volatility count for some of the primary risk metrics.
FSB chair and Bank of England governor Mark Carney has led the call for “vigilant monitoring” of the cryptocurrency sector, addressing the frenetic growth of markets following last year’s bull run.
Read more at: CCN
