With legal questions mounting around the push to adopt cryptocurrency as an accepted form of payment across countries around the world, French Senator Nathalie Goulet on Thursday (July 28) pushed for a committee to regulate their uses in that nation, according to a letter posted on the Senate’s site.
The Ministry of Economy and Finance said there were more than 5,000 cryptocurrencies in circulation around the world last year, the most popular and profitable being bitcoin. Although the crypto market has crashed since reaching its peak in November, there are plenty who still rely on cryptocurrency as their primary forms of payment in every situation where it’s allowed, the letter said.
But there are still plenty of people who don’t understand it, a scenario that requires intervention by the government to help everyone be on an equal playing field when it comes to cryptocurrencies.
“If the press regularly reports on the development of crypto-assets and their innovative character, and that social networks are riddled with advertisements extolling their merits and announcing product launches, each more grandiose than the other, the object remains poorly identified and many of our fellow citizens, strangers to this technology, struggle to understand it,” the letter said.
“Crypto-assets, thanks to the blockchain, pursue a simple objective: to make encoded, anonymous, secure, transparent exchanges possible for users and above all opaque for the authorities,” according to the letter. “The complete absence of regulation by a central authority allows users to completely escape the supervision of governments.”
The European Parliament and Council have adopted a Transfer of Funds Regulation (TFR) proposal aimed at combating money laundering through crypto-assets, forcing companies to identify the stakeholders from the first euro exchanged, but that rule won’t take effect immediately.
“If the financing of terrorism via crypto-assets is now a recognized problem, it is, in fact, only the visible part of the iceberg,” the letter says. “Crypto-assets are used today to support or participate in many other illegal activities.”
Related: French European Parliament Member Wants Binance Approval Regulatory Review
In June, a French Member of the European Parliament (MEP) wrote a letter pushing for her country’s market regulator to review its approval of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange, saying a news report shined a light on potential money-laundering activity on the platform.
Aurore Lalucq, who is also a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, wants regulators to justify its “incomprehensible” decision to register a Binance unit as a digital assets service provider.
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