Is FINCEN Enforcement About To Kick Up A Notch?
Mnuchin discusses crypto AML enforcement in the Senate while Powell talked digital dollars in Congress
Howzit Blockfolians?
The Lede
Lots of regulatory intrigue this week. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Congress that “we will be rolling out new regulations to be very clear on greater transparency so that law enforcement can see where the money is going and that this isn’t used for money laundering.”
The concern for many around these types of rules is that they often have the ancillary effect of impacting privacy even for law abiding users. Another US official, Fed Chair Jerome Powell spoke about privacy in a different context while testifying before Congress. His comments seem to suggest that any future US digital dollar plans would be privacy preserving.
Highly Relevant Reading
⚽️Messi! Messi! Messi! | Barcelona FC has launched a new fan engagement token - the Barca Fans Token ($BAR) in partnership with Chiliz and their mobile app Socios.com. Hard to know what the future of fan tokens is but if you’re going to do it, partnering with arguably the biggest soccer team in the world isn’t bad.
💰$30M to BlockFi | One of crypto’s biggest lenders has some serious new dry powder to build with. And with 20x revenue growth in 2019 and more than $650m in assets on its platform, it’s no wonder that VCs were flocking to get in.
⁉️So, are Fortnite V-Bucks a virtual currency or not? | In case it wasn’t clear that the crypto tax space is insanely confusing, the IRS released guidance that seemed to suggest that people should report their V-Bucks, but then scrubbed those mentions from the web. Look, this is confusing, okay? Incidentally, crypto taxes being confusing are why we just partnered with TokenTax.
Community Commentary
Investor Jeff Dorman says the Trump Futures from FTX we covered last week are even more important than we thought
A Really Big Number You Should Be Paying Attention To
$311,000,000
That’s the rough at-the-time USD value of the bitcoin cops are saying DropBit CEO Larry Harmon enabled to be laundered via a mixing app between 2014-2017. It would be worth ~$3.7B today. Guess they’re serious about that increasing enforcement thing, eh?
Final Thought
Is bitcoin the best or the worst Valentine’s Day gift?