Earlier this month, Finland approved a new Act on Virtual Currency Service Providers and an amendment to its Act on Detecting and Preventing Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (or AML law). With such changes, custodian wallet providers and cryptocurrency exchanges, like Finnish peer-to-peer (P2P) crypto startup LocalBitcoins, will be subject to these laws supervised by the Financial Supervisory Authority of Finland.
With the new laws coming into full effect in November this year, LocalBitcoins has shared on its official blog that it is busy working on “improvement measures” to ensure it remains compliant. It also views the laws as a positive development for the industry and the community that “should improve significantly Bitcoin’s standing as a viable and legit financial network”.
As part of its compliance efforts, LocalBitcoins has already switched to a new registration process for users where they can already verify basic information at sign-up. It is still working on a better, safer identity verification method for users while corporate employees will use another method.
LocalBitcoins’ blog update comes soon after Finnish crypto exchange Prasos Oy was reported by crypto media as being nearly “frozen” after several local banks refused to conduct business with it due to concerns over the legal status of crypto, and Prasos Oy’s 10-fold spike in trading volume to $185 million back in 2017.
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