- Due to regulatory pressures, the Huobi exchange has announced its decision to remove ASH, DCR, FIRO, XMR, XVG, ZEC, and ZEN, seven private cryptos from its platform.
- Starting September 12, Huobi will no longer accept privacy coin deposits and withdrawals will continue to work until September 19.
Privacy cryptocurrencies allow users to remain anonymous on the blockchain, unlike other cryptos like Bitcoin or Ethereum which are pseudo-anonymous. However, this high degree of privacy is highly distasteful to regulators.
Certainly, privacy cryptocurrencies such as XMR (Monero) favor money laundering and terrorist financing by making it difficult or impossible for the authorities to trace transactions. However, there are users who use this type of crypto assets with the aim of increasing not to disclose their financial information without any criminal reason.
And as we have said on other occasions, privacy is not a crime, although it seems so.
Thus, the authorities have begun to take strict measures against private cryptocurrencies and any solution aimed at increasing anonymity on the blockchain, such as Tornado Cash.
In the midst of a war between privacy cryptocurrencies and regulators, the crypto exchange huobi ha announced its decision to remove seven private cryptos from its platform citing regulatory pressures.
Huobi is a centralized crypto exchange (CEX) and therefore regulators have someone to turn to to ensure anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing regulations. Likewise, Huobi has the decision-making power to remove private cryptocurrencies from its platform and thus avoid regulatory conflicts.
Goodbye to XMR on Huobi
As of September 19, several privacy tokens will be removed from the platform. The affected tokens will be Dash (DSH), Decred (DCR), Firo (FIRO), Monero (XMR), Verge (XVG), Zcash (ZEC), and Horizen (ZEN).
As of September 12, Huobi will no longer accept deposits in privacy coins and lWithdrawals will continue to work, at least until September 19.
Huobi assured that the decision is intended to comply “with the latest financial regulations.”
“Huobi Global strictly adheres to the compliance policies of each country and region and always strives to safeguard our users’ assets.” the firm said.
According to the list of rules of the crypto exchange, Huobi Global has the right to hide or suspend privacy token trading when it does not support offline signatures or its node source codes are not open source.
What will those who own these privacy coins do?
Users with crypto accounts on Huobi will need to withdraw their holdings in the aforementioned cryptocurrencies.
Some of the other centralized crypto exchanges that still have privacy cryptos listed are Binance and Kraken. There is also the possibility of holding the privacy tokens in cold wallets such as Ledger or Trezor.
Privacy token holders cannot lose sight of the updates on the regulation of this type of crypto asset. It is possible that other centralized crypto exchanges will make similar decisions to Huobi and therefore, the holders of these cryptos will have to look for alternatives.
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