Bancor

Decentralized exchange platform Bancor is planning to restrict United States residents from trading tokens on July 8th. This was confirmed via a blog post.

Standing on a lack of clarity from regulators, executives said they took the decision to ban all users with a U.S. IP address from exchanging cryptocurrency.

The blog post reads in part: “This decision has been made in light of increased regulatory uncertainty; at this time, we believe this is the most judicious decision for all the members of our ecosystem,”

“This will enable the Bancor community and ecosystem to innovate faster and with greater clarity.”

Bancor runs as a decentralized protocol using a P2P setup and the regulatory situation involving another decentralized exchange (DEX), Etherdelta, in 2018 illustrates the difficulties of operating such a service in the U.S.

The country’s Securities and Exchange Commission charged the creator of Etherdelta, Zachary Coburn, with operating an unregistered securities trading platform. A fine of over $300,000 was in play.

Bancor adds that all its users will still be able to hold and transfer tokens, saying that the decentralized portions of its network were beyond its control and would thus remain open to U.S. traders.

The blog post continued thus : “We would like to clarify that this functionality will be blocked to users accessing the website bancor.network, which offers an interface to blockchain activity,”

“As the Bancor Liquidity Network is a collection of smart contracts on the blockchain, and a non-custodial system, we cannot restrict users from accessing the blockchain itself. This cannot be blocked.”