Australian Regulations for Crypto Exchanges
The Australian Government (AUSTRAC) released a new legislative notice to Australian cryptocurrency exchanges on April 3rd, 2018. As stated in the notice, Australian cryptocurrency exchanges are now required to register and comply with the anti-money laundering/counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) requirements.
The new requirements are listed on the AUSTRAC website as follows:
• Adopting and maintaining an AML/CTF program to identify, mitigate and manage money laundering and terrorism financing risks.
• Identifying and verifying the identities of their customers.
• Reporting to AUSTRAC suspicious matters, and transactions involving physical currency of $10,000 or more.
• Keeping certain records for seven years.
Starting April 3rd, 2018, exchanges have a grace period of six months, during which time they may continue providing their services while their applications are under consideration. The exception being an exchange not taking “reasonable steps” to comply. Australian Cryptocurrency exchanges are required to register online with AUSTRAC by May 14th, 2018.
Australia is now the second nation in the world to put national regulatory standards on cryptocurrency exchanges, behind Japan. Now that two countries have placed regulatory standards on exchanges based in their nation, it will be interesting to see if more countries will begin releasing their own regulatory legislation.
Chrome bans new mining extensions, will remove existing ones
Google Chrome’s Extensions Platform Product Manager James Wagner has announced on the Chromium blog that Chrome will discontinue listing mining extensions on its Chrome Web Store. Wagner states that Chrome has observed an increasing amount of malicious extensions taking advantage of users on their app store by presenting utility to the user, but invisibly running mining scripts on the user’s device. In addition, 90% of mining script presenting extensions have been denied listing or delisted on the Chrome Web Store because they fail to uphold Chrome extension standards. Those standards include requiring extensions to perform their advertised purpose as their only purpose and require extensions to fully inform the user about what exactly is going on within the extension. Wagner writes that Chrome plans to delist all existing mining extensions in late June.
While Wagner did not give an exact reason for the delisting of all existing mining extensions, it is likely that the decision is a protectionary measure for all chrome users and their devices.
Binance adds Groesetlcoin
Today, Binance announced that Groesetlcoin (GRS) trading pairs are now available for trading. Users can start depositing their GRS to their Binance account as well for holding/trading. The trading pairs currently available on Binance are GRS/BTC and GRS/ETH.
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