Forty crypto companies signed an open letter to the European Parliament, the European Commission and other major EU institutions with a call to ensure common sense regulation, standardized compliance procedures and a business environment conducive to innovation.
An open letter on behalf of the international Web3 community and “businesses across Europe,” shared with Cointelegraph by one of the signatories, was sent to the EU institutions on Tuesday. Industry players raised concerns about some recent regulatory initiatives at the EU level:
“We urgently wish to convey our concern about proposed EU laws that threaten people’s privacy, as well as digital innovation, growth and job creation in Europe.”
More specifically, the co-signers argued that recent proposals by some EU legislators, such as data disclosure requirements for non-custodial cryptocurrency wallets, may make adoption of Web3 solutions unduly burdensome for European citizens.
Crypto interest groups encouraged regulators “not to exceed the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Travel Rule recommendations for record keeping and verification of Crypto Asset Service Providers (CASPs). English)” and “ensure that protocols and decentralized entities are exempt from legal entity organization and registration.”
Other calls included exempting algorithmic or otherwise decentralized stablecoins from the asset-referenced token definition in the proposed EU Regulation on the Markets in Crypto Assets, or MiCA.
Stakeholders who have signed a letter include Ledger’s Pascal Gauthier, DeFi Technologies’ Diana Biggs, Bitstamp Europe’s Jean-Baptiste Grafiteau, Blockchain.com’s Lane Kasselman, and others.
On March 31, Members of two European Parliament committees voted in favor of the anti-money laundering (AML) regulatory package that seeks to revise the current Transfer Funds Regulation (TFR) in a way that requires cryptocurrency service providers to “verify the accuracy from [la] information regarding the originator or beneficiary behind the non-custodial wallet” for each transaction made between a service provider (typically a cryptocurrency exchange) and a non-custodial wallet. Many prominent founders and executives in the cryptocurrency space condemned the move, calling the requirements excessive and unfeasible.
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