In the U.S., President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2021 budget, sitting at $4.8 trillion as of this week, proposes expanding the Treasury Department’s oversight of cryptocurrency. The budget, released Monday (Feb. 10) seeks to do so by returning the U.S. Secret Service under its umbrella, rather than under Homeland Security where it currently is, according to published reports.
By doing this, the Secret Service will have a new breadth in the ways it can respond to cryptocurrency-related crimes like fraud, and it will be able to better look at terrorist activity, which cryptocurrency has been known to fund in the past.
The Secret Service is typically known for protecting the President, but also has a long history of investigating fraud, counterfeiting and more.
But Trump’s proposed budget has to go through Congressional review before becoming law — right now, all it does is identify his administration’s priorities.
In other cryptocurrency news, U.K. startup DAG Global is making an attempt to get a banking license for cryptocurrency, according to the Financial Times on Monday. The process will serve as a test of the willingness of bank regulators to accept the new form of digital currency.
Traditionally, that hasn’t always boded well for crypto banks, companies that provide the currencies have struggled in the past to maintain working relationships with large banks due to the perception related to money laundering and other illicit activities.
But DAG Global wants to change that. It wanted to launch in 2019, though it was delayed due to increased scrutiny on companies trying for similar business models.
Meanwhile, Ukranian leaders say crypto mining doesn’t need to be regulated at all, by either government boards or third-party bodies, according to the Ministry of Digital Transformation.
In a manifest on virtual assets published Feb. 7, the Ministry of Digital Transformation said it also wants to help establish a way for technologies to flourish in a de-centralized manner, according to Coindesk. The ministry wants to see a proper system for verification and evaluation implemented, and it wants to promote interaction between the market, virtual assets and their development.
Ukraine has been venturing into the cryptocurrency and blockchain space in recent months, with the State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine recently saying it’ll be responsible for tracking crypto funds and investigating how those funds are spent.
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