Three cryptocurrency firms announced they will be shutting down over the introduction of the AMLD5 European Union regulation that’s coming into effect on January 10th, 2020.
The first firm to announce it will be shutting down was Bottle Pay, which provided its users a service to send cryptocurrency via social media accounts. The firm will be shutting down after “seeing huge growth in user numbers over the last few months” and raising $2 million in a seed funding round.
According to Bottle Pay on why they are shutting down because the new regulations would “alter the current user experience radically, and so negatively” that to maintain their “integrity as service providers” and to protect its users, it decided to shut down.
TheBlock has reported that a cryptocurrency mining pool and a bitcoin gaming platform, are shutting down over the same regulations. The mining pool, Simplecoin, published a notice on its website revealing it will shut down not to implement know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) checks on its service, to protect users’ privacy.
According to the platform, “When the laws come into effect, we would be forced to require you, the users, to identify yourselves for anti money-laundering purposes. We have been searching for solutions for a while, but it has become apparent that there is no way around it. (…) Mining should to be available to anyone and we refuse to jeopardise our users’ privacy.”
Christian Grieger, Simplecoin’s co-founder revealed that the firm has 42,000 users and two employees and that users have until December 20th to withdraw their funds and until December 31st to delete their account information.
Also gaming platform, Chopcoin, also co-founded by Grieger, is shutting down over the same regulation.