New rules for tracing crypto transfers given go-ahead in the EU

The EU parliament has endorsed the first EU rules - Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) - to trace crypto-asset transfers prevent money laundering as well as common rules on supervision and customer protection.

These aim to ensure that crypto transfers as is the case with any other financial operation can always be traced and suspicious transactions blocked. The ‘travel rule’ already used in traditional finance will in future cover transfers of crypto assets so that information on the source of the asset and its beneficiary will have to travel with the transaction and be stored on both sides of the transfer.

The law would also cover transactions above €1 000 from self-hosted wallets (a crypto-asset wallet address of a private user) when they interact with hosted wallets managed by crypto-assets service providers. The rules do not apply to person-to-person transfers conducted without a...