Monero (XMR) price has fallen nearly 7% in the last 24 hours after Kraken announced its move to delist the digital asset in Europe.
In reaction to the regulatory change, Kraken, one of the oldest cryptocurrency exchanges, decided to remove Monero for users in the European Economic Area.
Kraken Delists Monero, XMR price down over 7%
Trading and deposits in all Monero markets will, therefore, be closed on October 31st for EEA clients, and any outstanding orders will automatically be canceled.
According to the official announcement, users will have to withdraw their Monero until December 31st. After that, any unwithdrawn balances will be automatically converted at the market rate into BTC.
Kraken explained it had to delist Monero (XMR) for its users in the European Economic Area (EEA) due to new regulatory requirements. It insisted that this call was not taken lightly. XMR price immediately went down by over 7%.
This represents a second such move, after an identical action was taken by Binance back in February amid increasing pressure on these privacy-centric cryptocurrencies.
Reports back in the first half of this year had already signaled that the privacy coins, including Monero, Zcash, and Horizen, were on course to get delisted by the major exchanges amid rampant regulatory scrutiny.
XMR Bans Spread as Regulators Target Anonymity
Earlier this year Kraken stopped trading XMR to Ireland and Belgium – on April 11 the users were told to “either close the position or it will be automatically closed on our end.” In 2021, it had stopped support for Monero customers resident in the United Kingdom.
The world’s regulations have cracked down on privacy tokens. Bans for them have so far hit different jurisdictions. Japan’s ban on anonymity-enhanced tokens was effectuated in 2018, while South Korea issued a similar ban reportedly back in 2020-on the trading of such tokens on platforms.
Australian exchanges lately take to delisting some of these privacy tokens because of new regulations. The very latest ban, as of this writing, is by Dubai on February 7, 2023, where it banned all activities concerning privacy coins and the issuance of anonymity-enhanced tokens.
XMR price finally broke below the falling trendline drawn from connecting several lows since the beginning of August on September 24, shedding 14.5% week-on-week. It also closed below the 61.8% Fibonacci retracement level at 152.83$ this Tuesday, calculated from the early August low of 135.98$ to its peak of 180.10$ this month.
At the time of writing XMR price stood at $140.19 and was down by 5.82%.
In correspondence, the long-to-short ratio for Coinglass is 0.9, further iterating the bear outlook of Monero. This number is below one, showing that more traders are taking bearish positions in expectations of a fall of the XMR price.
Tornado Cash Dev Jailed: Privacy Tech Under Fire
Another incident that most definitely has raised red flags among advocates of privacy—and criticism—involved the legal troubles faced by the developers behind the decentralized cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash.
Unlike privacy coins, which by their very nature maintain transaction details private against third-party onlookers, mixers anonymize assets through otherwise public transactions, such as with Bitcoin. Privacy coins like XMR negated the need intrinsically for mixers, given that in their nature, transaction details are private in the first place.
Despite their differences, both trustless decentralized mixers and privacy coins have one aspect in common-they are permissionless systems beyond the control of their creators, inhibiting any form of oversight-from governments, for example.
But the same lack of oversight hasn’t saved a Dutch court from recently convicting Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev of money laundering, slapping him with five years and four months in prison.
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